Urban Green Design

08/07/2021

Research in psychology and health continues to show that people are happier and healthier when they have a chance to spend time outdoors!

Check out some of the benefits to spending time in nature with this graphic from Discover the Forest! 🌲🌳

15/06/2021

Playing around with iPad - now to add colour 🤔

10/06/2021

04/06/2021

Open to schools - £500 of resources and 2hours of free training for staff - got to be worth applying for 😊

Has your school applied for a Local School Nature Grant yet?

Schools in England, Wales and Scotland can apply for £500 of outdoor learning equipment and fully funded staff training, helping teachers to take lessons outside.

Round Two closes on 25 June: ltl.org.uk/projects/local-school-nature-grants/

03/06/2021

Love when these oriental poppies come out 🥰 #

01/06/2021

💚💚💚

Weekend wisdom. 💛

28/05/2021

Lovely walk over the Wastard today 🥰

27/05/2021

The recommendation is that children have 3 hours free play outdoors a day. Let that sit with you for a minute . . . 3 hours a day.

The reality is today's children are leading increasingly indoor, sedentary lifestyles. With an increase in parental fear over safety and advances in technology children are missing out on important childhood experiences. The kinds of experiences that helped you and I develop as people. As children learned to be inventive, creative and resourceful, playing with things that we found, making up games that could last for days. Adults were very much in the backgrounds and we learned how to keep ourselves safe, doing our own 'risk assessments.' We learned how to get along with other children and deal with conflicts without a grown up having to step in. We learned to be resilient.

The sad reality is that for a lot of children the only free play they have outdoors is at school. How school grounds are used, or sadly in many cases - not used - and the aesthetics of the grounds have a direct effect on how children feel about school and themselves. Put simply, if the outdoor space and what goes on there is not valued by the school the children themselves will feel that they don't matter.

Schools that actively work to improve their school grounds found not only improvements in children's behaviour and attitude to learning but also improved social interactions between children. They also found an increase in creative learning and environmental awareness.

If you'd like to find out more about how to unlock the potential of your school grounds, or are a school or nursery that feel they could benefit from one of our training sessions or advisory visits, get in touch to find out the different ways we can help 😊

26/05/2021

So true!!

Children's minds & bodies depend and thrive on active free play. 🌿

26/05/2021

Love the potential for maths in these rainbow sticks