Camp Hill Out of School Hours Care (OSHC) is a reasonably large service catering for 195 children in both the morning and afternoon. We focus largely on outdoor loose parts play facilitated and supervised with a playwork approach.

At OSHC we meet all our Framework (My Time Our Place) outcomes holistically in an outdoor setting. Staff are trained to be deeply engaged and observe play and realize the outcomes, principles and practices. Children regularly engage in activities such as cooking on the fire, building with loose parts, water play, tree climbing and playing in the rain.

Outdoor Classroom Day to us is a chance to normalise the idea of getting outside to learn. We see this day as a catalyst to showing people just how easy it can be!

OSHC made the call in 2017 to support the school we are attached to. As only approximately half the preps of the school come to us, the thought was that it would be an amazing to share our space with the other children. The children all had an amazing time and in 2018 we decided to invite the prep and grade one children. This time it was conducted over 2 days and was yet again a huge success. We are looking forward to having the prep and year one children back in 2019!

The children engaged in a lot of rigorous free play activities in the loose parts adventure playground. In addition to loose parts play we cooked over the fire, made clay tree spirits, set up a tyre run and engaged in water play.

Camp Hill OSHC is largely outdoor based with only weather (and not even always then) forcing us to use inside exclusively.

The benefits we have found by bringing children outdoors for learning include:

Learning (eg increased attentiveness, more engaged in discussions etc) – Children in our outdoor loose parts environment are infinitely more engaged as learners. Their ability to freely choose their activity means they choose to tackle problems relevant to them in that moment supporting engagement and real life learning outcomes.

Behaviour/personality (eg more outgoing, less shy) – The loose parts environment is excessively inclusive as most activities’ activity driven and always peer driven. This means we find a range of ages and genders often working together on one project out of interest rather than need. These play frames rarely require implied or direct permission to enter, just an interest, making them very accessible. This supports the involvement of special/additional needs children, social awkward and anxious children all find a place to play comfortably.

In regards to negative behaviour, we find the outdoor loose part environment is a heavy mitigator indeed. This is largely due to children’s ability to act in a flow state. The outdoor environment has manipulatable risks allowing children to set the degree of challenge relevant to their degree of developed skill. This ensures play, is never to easy, or to hard. Flow theory states that when challenges are to hard, anxiety occurs, and when they are to easy, boredom occurs. Anxiety or boredom being the two largest causations of negative behaviour reducing the chance for them to occur is a great thing.

Participation in team work (eg increased problem-solving skills etc) – Team work and collaboration is greatly magnified in the outdoor setting.  Loose parts greatly enhance opportunities for children to work together to create and construct their own environment. Some loose parts are heavy and require collaboration to move. Some require a lot of skill to manipulate causing children to innately negotiate, compromise and discuss options together to reach a goal.

The Outdoor Classroom Day Team would like to thank Camp Hill OHSC for sharing their story with us.

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