Learn how playing outdoors in nature can benefit your children intellectually, socially, emotionally, and physically, and discover activities for fostering their development.
Spent time in nature as a children,climbing trees, exploring rocks and bugs, or even just playing games outdoors with friends allow to build our brains, bodies, and characters for later life.
Today, ample research has shown that nature experiencies and exposure has numerous long-term benefits.
What Are the Benefits of experiencing Nature?
Natural environment fosters children’s intellectual, emotional, social and physical development. Surrounded by nature, children can experience their senses at a deeper level and understand better thier feeling and emotions allowing new questions to approach life.
Intellectual Benefits
Nature is a “door” to understand better theirself and the world around them. Children are innate scientists and love to experience their senses. Nature provides countless opportunities for discovery, creativity, problem-solving, and STEM education.
Interacting with natural environments allows children to learn by doing and experiment new possbilities of choises. Nature help children to think, question, and make hypotheses developing inquisitive minds. Whether they’re judging the distance between two rocks before jumping or considering where insects go in the winter, children are constantly thinking when they’re in nature. These experiences offer real, authentic learning like nothing else can. As children take risks, try and fail, and try again, they gain resilience and confidence.
Emotional Benefits
Children are free to explore, move about, and make noise — they are allow to unlish their self-expression that are often restricted indoors. In nature, children can run, jump, hop, skip, climb, roll, and shout, which relaxes, and reduces tension, anxiety, and restlessness.
Furthermore, nature enhances a sense of peace and often brings out nurturing qualities in children. Many energetic children slow down to dig a hole in sand, watch a ladybug, or spend focused time playing with a stick in a mud puddle.
Social Benefits
When children play outdoors they can interact with new and different playmates. In nature, children can play alone or connect with one another, learn to share, arise their empathy, and their problem solving capacity. When exploring outside, children make up their own rules and solve their own problems without inhibition or fears.
Physical Benefits
The natural environment offers endless opportunities for physical activity. Exposure to sunlight means children absorb vitamin D which has many positive benefits, including contributing to a strong immune system.
Outdoor play allows children to use and develop their muscles running, jumping, climbing.
Providing a reasonable balance of risk with a level of challenge allows children to learn new skills.
Environmental Benefits
Like parents develop a deeper awarenenss of our children about nature is a responsability we need to take. Our children are future stewards of the earth. In order to raise adults who are passionate about protecting the environment and preserving our planet, they must first feel the deep connection we have with it.
Some of the activities that children can expirience in nature:
- Build with and dig in dirt
- Watch worms wriggle through the soil
- Gaze at clouds
- Jump in puddles
- Listen to birds sing
- Smell fresh-cut grass
- Collect seeds
- Construct things with twigs and mud
