Separate Or Combined Outdoor Curriculum

[Julianne McLean]

would like to know what everyone uses for their outdoor curriculum, is it separate to your indoor one? How often do you evaluate it?

[Lorina]

I think it depends on what works well for the room. At one centre I was with we used the same program to include the outdoor play. We used a little "tree" icon next to the experience for outdoor play so we could differentiate between indoor and outdoor play. Since we had a shared playground, morning set up was done by one person in each room so everything could be set up. The children in each rooms were involved in experiences of both the rooms so it was good to see all the children involved in a variety of experiences. The outdoor experiences were evaluated daily in our "daily diary" and we also included "extension ideas" for outdoor play to follow up on interests etc.

At another centre, we had a separate outdoor program, with all rooms sharing the playground needing to add "activities" onto the program which was also displayed outside. Morning openers found this easy as they knew what they had to set up even though they weren't necessarily in the other room as all activities were easily displayed for the outdoor program. Each room evaluated their outdoor experiences in their daily journal. The program had to be complete the previous Friday and to be displayed Monday morning ready to go and sometimes some rooms may forget to fill in their activities so it will be left blank with no extra activities for their room. However, come Monday this would be rectified...

So yeah it really depends on how you would like to manage it...

Hope this helps,

,
Lorina

[Lorina]

Also wanted to add:

If you have a free flowing program with indoor and outdoor being offered all the time, it's probably easier to use the one program...

,
Lorina