Audit your environment

To audit the current provision for physical development outdoors in your school or setting, you can download our three sample audit sheets below. You should try to audit how your outdoor space is being used on several different occasions, so you can capture how it may be used at different times of day,  in various weather conditions and by different groups of children. Think about the potential of the space and record what could happen, as well as what children are doing to develop their physical skills and capabilities, and the resources and spaces they use to do so.

To observe children’s physicality, download the BoingWhooshRolyPoly outdoor observation audit sheet .

To explore children’s physical development outdoors, download the Outdoor audit sheet

To examine children’s outdoor play, download the Outdoor Play Observation audit sheet.

To assess an activity, you can use the  Risk Benefit Thought Cloud sheet

Further reading

Messy play

Messy play provides so many explorative and investigative experiences, which promote so many of the characteristics of effective learning.  Some easy ideas to start you

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Loose parts play

Here are some links to resources to support your play. Loose parts play tookit is such a rich and comprehensive free publication from Inspiring Scotland to

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Outdoors and Active

Outdoors and Active – an action research project commissioned by the London Borough of Newham – took practitioners from nurseries, schools, PVI settings and children’s

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What to do

Busy modern lives are having a dramatic impact on the health and wellbeing of our youngest children.  They play outdoors less, spend more time being

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Boing! Whoosh! RolyPoly!

Toddlers need plenty of balance practice once they are up and walking. Each of the three semi-circular canals in the inner ear respond to movement in different

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Overcoming barriers

An early task for the Outdoors and Active action researchers was to identify the barriers to taking children out and about beyond the setting.  Only

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Taking risks in play

Human beings are “hardwired” to take risks, from birth.  Babies take their first independent breaths; they decide to try crawling and walking and then running;

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Grab and Go Kits

Some of the childminders involved in the Outdoors and Active project thought that a kit of easy to carry, low cost resources could encourage children

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