Kids Korner
Accredited Family Child Care
Welcome, to Kids Korner Accredited Family Child Care and our Nature Explore Certified Outdoor Classroom.
This being the 5th year since we started our journey as a certified outdoor classroom we wanted to take a different approach with both our indoor and outdoor environments. Because of this, a center offering a variety of natural materials was added to our indoor environment. We designed an area within our existing certified outdoor classroom to facilitate as an extension of our indoor environment.
The children and their parents came up with the idea of a “Kids Creative Korner” and we ran with it. Our “Kids Creative Korner” is now at home within one of our main gathering areas, the corner arbor. We did this by adding waterproof mailboxes full of materials representing a variety of our indoor environment centers. Each mailbox is full of developmentally appropriate materials promoting a wide range of experiences, from math, music, science, manipulatives, language, to arts and crafts and STEM. This new area offers more exploration, limitless imagination, curiosity, and discovery to our outdoor classroom. Potted plants and hanging plants, capture the colorful details and add the benefit of a stress outlet to our “Kids Creative Korner”.
The character and charm of our outdoor classroom comes from the beauty and the colors of the flowers, grass, trees and garden as well as the textures and shapes of our beautiful pathways and wooden structures throughout our outdoor classroom. We added a child size table and chairs under the covered deck, another gathering area. During rain showers the children continue to have opportunities to enhance their fine motor and eye hand coordination skills while enjoying nature through their senses. To our music area, we only added a few new unique wooden materials for the children to discover. Our garden area is being prepped and the vegetables will be planted this weekend by our older children.
Having a safe and inviting certified outdoor classroom gives the children the ability for exploration and independent learning while facilitating growth and fostering freedom to move freely, giving them a sense of excitement and adventure. As always, we continue to support and maintain the safety of our certified classroom through routine maintenance such as touching up paint, staining, sealing, adding flowers, pulling weeds, and replacing damaged materials as needed. We have also created a Daily Outdoor Classroom Safety Checklist form. The family child care provider in charge checks off one area at a time to ensure that each area is safe for the children’s unstructured play within our outdoor classroom.