“Access to active play in nature and outdoors—with its risks—is essential for healthy child development. We recommend increasing children’s opportunities for self-directed play outdoors in all settings—at home, at school, in child care, the community and nature.” (www.childnature.ca)
In the summer of 2015, Pinecrest Queensway Headstart Nursery School started our first phase of transforming our playground. We met with a playground company in the early spring and began visiting other programs within the community to assist in brainstorming ideas. The children were excited to participate in all the processes and transformations of the yard. Children need variety in their play spaces; they need to be able to move from active, to imaginative, to passive play zones. The best playground designs encompass the complete site. Continue reading
“A Survival Guide to life with little children!” Could this be true?
Speaking of Apraxia by Leslie A Lindsay is an easy-to-read comprehensive guide geared towards parents who have a child diagnosed with Apraxia. Apraxia is a motor-speech disorder characterized by difficulty in planning correct speech sounds in the brain and communicating them in the proper sequence to the speech muscles. Written by a parent whose child was diagnosed with Apraxia, this book walks parents through the typical stages of receiving a diagnosis, accessing Speech and Language resources, and transitioning to school. The author uses current research as well as their personal experience to inform the reader without overwhelming them with jargon or professional lingo.
Loose parts provide the foundation for a play-based emergent curriculum that focuses on inquiry driven learning. According to Simon Nicholson, the definition for loose parts states: “In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.” 