Parent Infant Center
Our most exciting accomplishment this year has been a partnership with First Up, an organization that provides professional development and training to early childhood educators. This past spring we hosted teachers from area centers and modeled connecting children with nature. The experience involved the guest teachers observing children engaged with their environment on the playground. They saw structured (art and literacy activities) and unstructured (dramatic and free play) activities. These educators were able to take back what they learned with the goal of implementing high quality, nature-based education with their children.
Also on the playground…Each year PIC celebrates International Mud Day on its Nature Playground. This year was no different. We created muddy areas for children to touch, jump, and play in the mud. They had the rich sensory experience of connecting with nature in a very meaningful and messy way.
Our Nature Playground is open to the community in the evenings and on the weekends. It is a popular destination for neighborhood families. In addition, PIC puts on the Day of Play, its annual community-wide event. This year, more than 300 families came out for nature and music activities on our playground.
And of course our Nature Playground is used everyday by our early learners and school-age children engaged in play-based learning. Everyday they explore and make new discoveries. Finding plants and bugs is just one of many ways that these curious children explore the world.
The play space includes loose sticks and branches for building, tree stumps for balancing and jumping, a stage for performances, reading area for quiet times, a mud kitchen for culinary creations, and individual garden plots filled with flowers, herbs and vegetables planted by the children. In this way we are connecting children with nature, while handily supporting the Creative Curriculum studies of insects and gardening.
As a nature-based child care, preschool, and school-age program, the Magic Circle nature playground is central to the work that we do everyday with young children.
