By Nancy Olsen-Harbich, MA
Can you remember how powerful and free you felt as a child when you ran fast, climbed high, and yelled at the top of your lungs for playmates to follow along? Going outside to play for part of every day provides so many benefits for your child.
These include:
- Improving coordination and physical skills, such as running, jumping, climbing
- Burning calories, which can help prevent your child from becoming overweight
- Improving muscle tone and developing a healthier heart and lungs
- Honing the five senses by actually seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and sometimes (with adult guidance) tasting what nature has to offer
- Gaining an appreciation of nature that can help your child become a better citizen of the earth and respect other living things
Enjoy What Nature Has to Offer
Encouraging your child to play outdoors doesn’t mean you need a yard full of athletic apparatus. We who live on Long Island are lucky to have access to splendid beaches and other outdoor areas. In most cases, 3 to 5 year olds shouldn’t go outside by themselves. Here are some inexpensive ways you and your child can enjoy the great outdoors together:
- Get wet. You don’t need to have a pool to play in water. Set out tubs or pails of water and let kids splash, make bubbles, and just enjoy running their hands through water. Provide plastic containers for measuring and pouring, and spoons and spatulas for splashing. Remember that young children near water need close supervision.
- Go to the beach. If it’s not warm enough to swim, take a walk along the beach. Collect shells; encourage your child to look at the markings and feel the grooves; and talk about the animals that lived in the shells. Bring along plastic bags so you can take a few of your treasures home.
- Do art activities. Often discouraged inside because of the mess, art activities are a natural for outdoors. Let nature provide the materials—make leaf print and bark etchings, and mud and sand sculptures.
- Take neighborhood trips. Think your neighborhood doesn’t have any exciting sites? Things you think are humdrum can be new and exciting to a preschooler—such as a new home site with earth-moving machines and piles of pipes, or even roadwork surrounded by bright orange cones.
- Marvel at the night sky. Warm evenings offer the perfect opportunity to lay on a blanket, sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” and look up at the night sky. You don’t need to know the constellations, and your child doesn’t need to understand the speed of light to marvel at the stars and the moon.
Nancy Olsen-Harbich is Program Director and a Human Development Specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County’s Family Health and Wellness Program. She can be reached at 631-727-7850 ext. 332 or at no18@cornell.edu.