Children's involvement in outdoor play increases when they can easily access a variety of natural and other types of open-ended materials

Storli, R. ., Sandseter, E. ., & Sando, O. . (2020). Children’s involvement in free play and the use of play materials in the outdoor early childhood education and care environment. Children, Youth and Environments, 30, 66-82. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.7721/chilyoutenvi.30.1.0066

The type and quality of young children's play is shaped, in large part, by the affordances of an environment. Affordances are the perceived properties of the physical environment that support an individual's actions. When applied to young children's play, affordances represent action possibilities which encourage children to explore and experiment while engaged in various forms of active play. This study investigated the association between children's involvement in free play and the use of play materials in outdoor environments at preschools.

Data for this study was based on 935 systematic and randomized video observations of 86 children involved in free play in the outdoor spaces of eight early childhood education centers in Norway. Free play meant “children could decide what they wanted to do, where they wanted to be and with whom they wanted to interact.” While the outdoor playspaces of the participating programs varied considerably in terms of size, there were little differences in their design, fixed playground equipment, or play materials, such as tricycles, buckets, toy trucks, and spades. Researchers used the Leuven Involvement Scale for assessing children's involvement in free play. This scale is designed for two-minute observations scored on a 5-point scale, with 1 indicating that the child hardly shows any activity and 5 indicating the child is continuously engaged in the activity and completely absorbed with it. Researchers also coded the type of materials used for play based on seven categories: sand, water, mud, nature materials, toys, open-ended materials, and wheeled toys. The percentage of time the material was used during an observation was also recorded.

Toys were used more often than other types of materials. On average, children used toys 32 percent of the time. Other materials used quite frequently were nature materials (14 percent), wheeled toys (13 percent), and sand (11 percent). Water was used 8 percent of the time, open-ended materials 7 percent, and mud only 1 percent. Children often used two or more different play materials at once. Doing so, increased the level of involvement. Playing with toys, water and sand at the same time, for example, was estimated to increase involvement by 1.2 points on the Leuven Involvement Scale. Generally, children's play with loose parts and movable materials – with the exception of wheeled toys – tended to be associated with higher play involvement scores. Results showed no significant differences between boys and girls in terms of the associations between involvement and different play materials. There were age differences, however, in levels of involvement, with older children tending to score higher than younger children.

This research indicates that “children are strongly attracted to and prefer playing with loose parts and movable materials” in an outdoor playspace. This research also indicates that easy access to a variety of play materials that can be used simultaneously in a preschool outdoor environment “can intensify children's involvement in their play activities.”

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