Children are constantly working to make sense of themselves, their experiences, and their worlds. One way that children tend to do this is through creating artifacts. By engaging in discussions around, and interacting with these artifacts, teachers and educators are able to gain further insight into the experiences of children. Through observing…

A robust emergence of outdoor nature-based play areas in several European, Australian, Asian countries, as well as North America Canadian provinces, has occurred recently. This study explored the rationale for and construction of different play zones and affordances for children at a United States Central Kentucky local arboretum and research…

Tree climbing is one aspect of nature play; however, it is limited in many areas due to fear of liability, heightened safety awareness, unclear policies, accessibility, and restrictive outdoor play time. This study investigated current practices concerning tree climbing in early childhood settings with the objective of creating recommendations,…

Farm- and nature-based early childhood education programs have a unique potential to provide young children with skills and experiences that build a strong foundation for future learning and environmental stewardship, but can also to extend positive impacts to families. In this paper, we work to bridge the gap between research and practice by…

To support a sustainable planet, preschools need to engage young children with sustainability education. In the United States of America (USA), nature-based preschool programs are likely to promote environmental science and nature education, given their outdoor curricula, but very little is known about how these programs might also cultivate…

Recognizing the inherent value in outdoor play and learning for young children, we focused upon the practices and perspectives of adults at an early childhood center as the outdoor play areas were transformed into outdoor classrooms. A salient finding emerging from the data exhibited a gap between constructivist child-led theories of play and…

Gull, Levenson Goldstein, and Rosengarten (2018) examined the benefits and risks associated with tree climbing on child development and resiliency in regards to parental perspectives; however, it lacked a clear male perspective. The recommendations from that study mentioned that 93% of the responses originally came from mothers; hence, the need to…

Increasing demands of accountability and academic readiness across U.S. preschools are often accompanied by decreased play and time outdoors during the school day. The nature preschool movement, grounded in a desire to foster connection to the natural world while also supporting important developmental processes and school readiness, counteracts…

Loose parts is often an ambiguous term with different interpretations depending on the context. Using the search parameters, a scoping review was implemented to narrow down over 2,400 articles related to "loose parts," "early childhood," and "outdoor classrooms" to 15 articles for in-depth review. From the selected…

Time spent outdoors benefits children's physical, social and psychological development, although children today spend far less time outdoors than children of previous generations. The nature-based school initiative has grown in popularity as a means of increasing children's connection with nature and harnessing its benefits for their educational…

This study examined the benefits and risks associated with tree climbing on child development and resiliency. A mixed method survey instrument was administered to parents of children aged 3-13 years who climbed trees. The survey examined demographics, details of tree climbing activities, and the type of injuries that have resulted from this type…

In the context of the importance of nature experiences in supporting development during early childhood and toward encouraging the use of natural outdoor settings with young children, research was undertaken to explore potential relationships among parents' and young children's preferences regarding outdoor play settings and young children's…

This paper reports on a study of day care children, ages 2 years 6 months to almost 5 years old, who visited a naturalized area near their day care once a week, over several months. The focus of this paper is on the embodied learning and expression of children's learning, along with their use of oral language. The children engaged in some…