Exploring Our Local Area: From Forest Floors to Supermarket Aisles 🌳🦆🥕
Sometimes the best adventures are much closer to home than we think.
This week, our Preschool children have been exploring our local area – from the animals and textures of the New Forest to bugs hiding amongst leaves, a picnic beside the duck pond and even the fruit and vegetable aisles of our local ASDA.
No passport required. Not even a minibus. Just some sensible shoes, curious little minds and, apparently, grown-ups who need to be carefully supervised so they don't get lost. 😄
Bringing the New Forest inside 🌲
Living so close to the New Forest gives our children a wonderful natural environment to become familiar with, so we began by bringing a little piece of it into Preschool.
Our New Forest sensory tray was filled with woodland animals and natural and nature-inspired materials including sticks, slices of wood, leaves, pinecones, soil and moss. As the children explored, we talked about the animals that live in the New Forest, where they might make their homes and when we might be lucky enough to see them.
But there is much more happening during this kind of play than simply learning the names of animals. Children are touching rough bark and soft moss, comparing materials, arranging and rearranging objects, creating little habitats and using new words to describe what they can see and feel.
The Department for Education's Development Matters guidance specifically encourages three- and four-year-olds to use all their senses to explore natural materials, investigate collections of different materials and talk about what they notice using increasingly rich vocabulary. In other words, a tray containing sticks, pinecones and a few small animals can become a surprisingly busy place for thinking.
Going on a bug hunt 🐛🔎
Next came some considerably smaller local residents.
Our bug-hunting sensory tray contained leaves, twigs and other natural materials, with minibeasts waiting to be discovered. This time the children also had a bug hunt checklist, turning their exploration into a little investigation. Could they find the spider? What about the beetle? Had anybody spotted the caterpillar yet?
A checklist adds an interesting new dimension to play. Children have to look closely, compare what they find with the pictures, recognise similarities and differences and keep track of their discoveries. There is early literacy in recognising the pictures and words, early maths in counting and matching, communication as children discuss their finds – and plenty of concentration when a particularly elusive bug refuses to reveal itself. Most importantly, though, they are playing and exploring.
The EYFS statutory framework describes this as one of the characteristics of effective teaching and learning: children investigate, experience things and "have a go".
Then we went to see our neighbourhood for ourselves 🦆
Of course, pictures and sensory trays can only take us so far. To really understand the place where you live, you need to get out into it. So we walked to our local duck pond.
Along the way, the children noticed the different buildings around them and practised walking safely together as a group within their community.
At the pond, we stopped on the bridge to look closely at the water and what was happening around it. We enjoyed a picnic snack and then investigated the wooden animal sculptures in the park. These quickly became an opportunity for climbing and balancing – testing what our bodies could do, judging where to put our feet and developing confidence in our own physical abilities.
There is something lovely about this sort of learning because nobody needs to announce: "Right children, we are now developing our gross motor skills." There is simply an interesting wooden creature in front of you that absolutely must be climbed on. And the learning follows.
A sensory adventure... in ASDA? 🥦
Our next trip was somewhere even more familiar: the supermarket next door.
For adults, a supermarket can feel fairly ordinary. We go in, attempt to remember what we came for, buy several things that weren't on the list and inevitably remember the one thing we actually needed once we are back outside.
For a young child, however, it can be a completely different experience. A supermarket is full of things to see, hear, smell and touch.
During our visit to ASDA, the children listened to the different sounds around them and took time to look at the enormous variety of fruit and vegetables on display. They felt the texture of a swede, smelled fresh basil and noticed the different colours, shapes and sizes of the produce around them. Things that are very ordinary to us can be fascinating when you stop and examine them properly.
A swede isn't simply a vegetable. It is heavy. It is hard. Its skin feels completely different from the smooth skin of an apple or the delicate leaves of a herb. Basil isn't just something sitting in a packet on a shelf either. It has a very distinctive smell – and smelling it yourself gives the word basil a meaning that a photograph never quite could.
The children also noticed numbers throughout the shop. Suddenly numbers aren't just something printed on a number card at nursery. They appear on signs, shelves, displays and packaging all around us. And then there was something even more meaningful: they helped choose and buy the food for their own snack. That simple experience connects so many things children encounter in play with real life. Shops are places where people in our community go to find things they need. Food is selected, bought and then taken somewhere else to be eaten. Choices have a real purpose.
Interestingly, the Department for Education's Help for Early Years Providers guidance specifically suggests visits to a local supermarket or corner shop as a way of helping children understand the world around them. It points out that shopping with an early years setting can be a very different experience from simply accompanying the family – because we can slow it down, talk about what children notice and give them time to explore.
Why exploring our local area matters
For young children, Understanding the World begins with the world they actually know.
The Department for Education's Help for Early Years Providers: Personal Experiences guidance explains that children's everyday experiences help them make sense of the world. It specifically highlights going for walks as a way of developing children's sense of place and their understanding of their local area – noticing things such as buildings, woodland, plants, animals and vehicles as they go.
That is exactly what these little adventures are about.
Before a child can really understand forests on another continent, bustling cities on the other side of the world or habitats in faraway countries, there is enormous value in first noticing:
This is my road.
This is our pond.
These are some of the animals that live near me.
This is where people in my community buy their food.
These familiar experiences give children something to connect new knowledge to later. They also generate conversation. A child who has actually held a swede, smelled basil, balanced on a wooden sculpture, searched through leaves for a beetle or stood on a bridge looking into a pond has a bank of experiences to talk about, remember, compare and build upon.
The world is already full of resources. Sometimes all we need to do is go outside and notice them. 🌳💚
What a lovely opportunity for the little ones