Teaching Kids About the Outdoors

"Hi, I'm Pam on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to teach you how to bring home fundamentals learned at school. By playing outdoors, a lot of kids can experience accomplishment and growing confidence when they're engaging in purposeful activities. A sense of pride when they do something on their own, like starting a swing all by themselves, or throwing or catching a ball, or jumping higher, or climbing higher than they did before. They learn social skills by sharing equipment, working together, following the rules. Many reports suggest that the number of children overweight is increasing because of not getting large muscle activity that's essential for healthy development. Gross motor skills come from running, hopping, swinging, and jumping. Jumping, like during basketball. Throwing heavier objects. For a three year old, this is kind of big, but you want to get the right size ball. By throwing it, they're growing their large muscle skills. This is something that you can do with them also. A way that you can bring outdoor activity home, go outdoors with your kids. It doesn't matter what you do, just get outside with them. If you just want to go for a walk, or if you like to play basketball, play it with them. They learn to count, measure, calculate, they know patterns, they solve problems. Being outdoors is also a natural gateway to the science of discovery; they're going to be noticing things."