The educational benefits of real world experiences for kids
Every parent intuitively understand the importance of fresh air and going for walks with their children. It starts when they are weeks old babies with prams or slings. It is important for the babies to get a sense for the world outside the home early in their lives.
And this remains important for their early learning development. The UNESCO report on how children learn [2002] cites active involvement and relating classroom learning to real world situations as important components of successful education [see our series of posts covering the entire UNESCO report]. This is especially important for early learning where little ones have limited experience upon which to draw to assimilate learning. Child psychologists agree that getting children out of the house and into their local environment is crucial for early development, whether that is in nature or just in the local town environment around the house. As parents we know this intuitively, which is why we bring our new born babies out in prams. But it's not just about fresh air and exercise (once they can walk of course), it is also about sensory stimulation and observing how the world works. It is about learn the words that describe things that they see everyday and seeing how social interaction works.
This concept of learning about how the world works is very important for their ability to operate within the world confidently and competently. For example, how does a child learn to be cautious around road traffic and cross a road carefully and safely? It is learned behaviour. It is never too early to begin the process of teaching these life skills. With our son we got to the point quite early when we could trust him to stop at a road crossing and never run across the road on his own. This afforded him a measure of freedom to run ahead on a walk and us a measure of anxiety relief as parents. While walking around with parents or carers children also observe how people act. They see all the levels of interactions and emotions that we all take for granted as adults but are crucial for child development.
Once they are old enough, we can also introduce actual learning opportunities on our walks and even in car journeys, the classic being the game of eye spy, which can be done as “something coloured X” rather than something beginning with a letter for young children not yet able to spell. A couple of activities that we found very useful and engaging were reading road signs and feeding birds in local parks. So much so that we made a video on each one.
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