Headteacher: I am the Headteacher at Kirkliston Nursery School. When I first started here at Kirkliston Nursery School in 1996, I found a barren playground completely covered in asphalt. We did engage in outdoor play, but that meant carrying all of the equipment and resources out from the nursery, into the garden area. And the weather was always a problem – the staff and myself realised there was a need to do a revamp of the whole outside area.
The inspiration for this came from an application form from Grounds for Awareness, who would fund an environmental project in the school grounds. So, with this in mind, we set about and asked the children what they would like in the outside area, we asked the parents and we checked the staff… and that’s how it began.
Teacher 1: The outdoor play area here is really just an extension of the school inside. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a maths activity inside or outside – we use the outdoor activity area just, really, to extend the children’s knowledge and understanding of the world. But we also use it for all areas of the curriculum.
So, the outside area is just like another classroom but it has advantages that, obviously, indoors doesn’t. Children are able to be little detectives in their own right, they are able to investigate the natural world that’s there anyway. And they are open to the seasons, they are open to the weather – which isn’t going to happen inside.
So, there is cause and effect – why did the leaves blow? Why does the shadow fall onto the solar panel? Why is it not working? There is all these things that we just have to investigate.
Teacher 2: We use the garden regularly – we use it everyday. We would be out in any type of weather. I find when the children are outside, that they work together a lot more – they’ve got a lot more collaborative, problem-solving activities that they can be involved in.
Today we’ve got the pipes and the guttering out for the children to be really sort of touching on basic physics. That’s what they’re doing there. They’ve got a ball, and they’re trying to get the ball from one end of the playground to the other without it dropping on the ground. And they’ve got all these sections of guttering and pipe-work and crates and things like that, and they’ve got to create the path for the ball. And the children are having to work as a team because if they're working as individuals and they pull something and knock something down at the other end, they have to communicate with one another and shout across to one another to work together to make it work. So, there is a lot of collaborative teamwork that goes on outside and it is brilliant to see – to sit back and to observe.
They have the confidence that they're not being watched the whole time – even though, yes, there are members of staff out in the area, but they can be in the sound corner making as much noise as they like, they can be in the house and they're not going to be getting a member of staff coming over and interacting all the time. They have that freedom to play.
Teacher 1: Each child develops at their own pace and, depending on what their interests are in, we can help them to develop different skills. If, for instance, it’s an activity digging up potatoes it can become a maths lesson – looking at the size and the number of potatoes. And the children are discovering where the potatoes come from, so they're independent learners – they are using their own knowledge and their own awareness of what's going on around them and they become more responsible citizens to share the equipment.
They’ve got to be aware of what they are doing, the impact they are having on other people – if they have something for a long time, other people don’t have it. So, they have an awareness of different children, they have an awareness of helping each other and what's going on around about them in their world.
The children work together as teams all the time. They are encouraged to be aware that, sometimes, if they're planning on doing something, if they're rolling balls up and down on pipes, they can’t do it on their own. So, they have to encourage other children to come and help them to achieve a goal together. So, sometimes the teamwork just naturally evolves. They’ll include children who are just standing and watching because they’ll realise that they might want to help – and that helps. Because if they're all contributing to what they're doing then they will all see and they will all learn.
They are their own managers in that aspect of what they are going to do and what they are going to achieve. They have got to have an idea of what they want to achieve and how they are going to help it. We facilitate that, we may ask open-ended questions – ‘How’s that going to happen? Why is that happening? What do you think we need to do next? Is there anything we need?’ And we put the emphasis back on the children to do the thinking and the learning about how they are going to achieve it. And if it goes wrong it doesn’t matter because that, in itself, is a learning curve for the children.
Headteacher: The planning that we do in the Nursery is for both areas. If there is an activity going on in the nursery then we will try and replicate it into the outside area in an appropriate fashion. The adults in the nursery are trying to create a stimulating, exciting environment for the children, through observing the children and assessing what they are doing and then providing opportunities to extend their learning into the next steps.
Teacher 1: Their creativity works on all levels, whether it’s designing – there are children using twigs and things out there making pictures with them just now – but they can also become creative in their own self, they can become another animal, they can become a butterfly (we have various pieces of equipment that can go out) and the children will wear the butterfly wings.
We have a house area where they can become involved in role-play. They may decide that it’s not going to be a house, it’s going to be a bus and they are all going to the zoo and everybody’s got to get on board and, maybe, you’ve got to have tickets... so, you can have children making decisions about what we need to get on a bus. We need a driver, so who’s going to drive? We need tickets, we need money… and they may make them and create them themselves, whether it’s using beads or buttons or whatever happens to be lying about, or they may come in and actually design and draw their own tickets. And they will use their own information from their experiences, themselves, to take that play further forward.
Teacher 2: The main focus of nursery is child-led education; that when children are enthusiastic, when they're excited, when they're motivated – that’s when they learn the most. And when we are in the outside area the children, as I said, they have the freedom to do what they want and so, their creativity is on a larger scale.
Put it like this, if the children are in the music corner – in the middle – they have got a very small area, a few instruments that they could be using and they have the rest of the room that they have to take into consideration. So, if they're banging away on the drum, the children at the listening centre at the Smartboard are getting interrupted. Whereas, when we are outside, the children have a large sound area – they could use the whole garden as a sound area if they wish. And so, their creativity is not squashed, in a sense. They're able to explore, to let go! I don’t think I’ve ever once said outside, ‘It’s too noisy, quieten down.’
So, definitely, when it comes to things like creativity, the outside environment is just wonderful for providing for that.
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