Transforming Your Outdoor Early Learning Environment - by Lisa Daly (Paperback)

About the Book

"Transforming Your Outdoor Early Learning Environments invites center and home-based educators to reimagine and reconstruct their image of conventional children's play yards as they know them and to create beautiful outdoor learning spaces on a limited budget with natural elements and loose parts that offer children opportunity for irresistible engaging explorations. Ideas, inspiration, and benefits for changing outdoor environments are provided along with the basics for designing, transforming, and maintaining 11 specific outdoor play zones"--

Book Synopsis

Transforming Your Outdoor Early Learning Environment invites center and home-based educators to reimagine and reconstruct their image of conventional children's play yards as they know them and to create beautiful outdoor learning spaces on a limited budget with natural elements and loose parts that offer children opportunity for irresistible engaging explorations. Ideas, inspiration, and benefits for changing outdoor environments are provided along with the basics for designing, transforming, and maintaining 11 specific outdoor play zones.

Transforming Your Outdoor Early Learning Environment offers an approach that:

Requires minimal financial resources

Features loose parts and upcycled materials

Integrates nature

Includes inspiring photos of before and after transformations

Offers design tips and material lists

Describes how play in each area fosters children's competencies, development, and learning in the areas of social and emotional, language and communication, cognitive, physical, and expressive arts

Review Quotes

"Wow! What an attractive and eminently practical book. Lisa Daly provides lavish photographic examples of how to transform early childhood play yards and home backyards. It's easy to say, 'I want one of those' and understand how you could create one of those spaces easily and economically. It's a feast of good ideas." --David Sobel, author of The Sky Above and the Mud Below and Nature Preschools and Forest Kindergartens, professor emeritus in the Education Department at Antioch University New England in Keene, New Hampshire.

"What Lisa Daly brings to the environments is truly transforming in so many ways. Lisa can create learning-rich environments where children and adults are able to create their own imaginations at every turn. The environments she creates have changed the quality of our family childcare homes, the homes cultivate exploration for the children and the providers. Providers have learned to understand what children need and how to incorporate it into their homes. I have watched providers regain a spark for teaching by transforming their learning environments. Lisa is an incredible wealth of knowledge and her passion for transforming environments is contagious." --Clara Nakai, coordinator Early Head Start/ Family Child Care Homes, Modesto City Schools, Early Childhood Education

About the Author

Lisa Daly is passionate about transforming early learning to deepen meaningful experiences and connections, innovation, creativity, and reflection. Her professional work is centered around collaborating with educators to shift teaching approaches and transform learning environments to support children's identities, inquiry, and engagement. Lisa is professor emerita of early childhood education at Folsom Lake College, a child and family advocate, author, consultant, and presenter. Lisa has over 40 years of service as a classroom educator and administrator in preschool, parent co-operative, and college lab settings. She has co-authored Early Learning Theories Made Visible and the award-winning Loose Parts series with Redleaf Press.