Supporting Early Language, Physical Activity, and STEM Learning through Outdoor Time

Outdoor environments can be an authentic and engaging context for supporting the early language and physical activity of children with and without disabilities. Language skills are an important foundational skill for reading comprehension (Hjetland et al., 2017), which is essential to STEM skills such as scientific (Cabell & Hwang, 2020; Siler et al., 2010; Mayer et al., 2014) and mathematical reasoning (Cartwright et al., 2022; Foster et al., 2015; Gjicali et al., 2019).Physical activity has been found to produce improvements in children’s executive function, including attention and self-control (Willoughby et al., 2018), which are also important foundational skills for STEM (Willoughby et al., 2021; Ribner et al., 2023). In this blog, we describe concrete strategies for utilizing outdoor spaces and routines as a context for supporting early language, physical activity, and consequently, STEM learning.

Language

Research on language interactions between children and their caregivers specifically in outdoor spaces is limited, but what little research does exist shows us that outdoor interactions can produce:

• More responsive and connected conversations between adults and children
• More overall talk by children (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2018)

There are several dimensions of language that researchers agree support children’s later achievement (LARRC, 2015; LARRC, 2017), including the amount and types of talk (vocabulary) and complexity of talk (syntax). In the following sections, we describe how these dimensions could potentially support STEM learning in outdoor settings.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary is important for STEM learning because research shows us that children’s vocabularies predict later academic achievement, and that knowledge of “Tier 2 ” and “Tier 3 ” words is particularly important (O’Reilly et al., 2019).   Examples of “advanced “, or “Tier 2 ” (Beck et al., 2012) vocabulary words that children might be able to learn in outdoor interactions are words like”melt ” or”examine”, while “Tier 3 ” topic-specific words like “bark “, “moss “, “fungus “, or”reptile ” may be helpful for types of ecological knowledge. Knowledge of these words is important for later reading comprehension. Many science texts for school-age children include words like these, which are not commonly used in everyday conversation.

Additionally, while outdoors, children can learn not just nouns for different animals or plants they see, but also action verbs that are supported by physical activity, such as “leap “, “climb “, “step”, or “scramble”.

Syntax

Syntax, or grammatical knowledge of the arrangement of sentences and words is another important predictor of later reading comprehension (Catts et al., 2006; LARRC & Chiu, 2018; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). The more complex a sentence is, the greater reading comprehension is required to understand it. Exposure to complex sentences and utterances from caregivers supports children’s ability to learn those structures and internalize them for use in their own speech and writing.

For example, adverbial conjunctions such as “because”, “since”, and “so”, serve a “bridging” purpose between two thoughts, and expose children to casual thinking. You might explain the purpose of a pinecone’s scales by saying “Pinecones close when it’s about to rain because they need to keep their seeds dry. ” This sentence exposes the child to a complex grammatical structure similar to many scientific texts while also giving a casual explanation for a scientific phenomenon (Owen Van Horne et al., 2023). Therefore, the more exposure children have to this kind of complex language, the more equipped they will be to understand those structures when they encounter them in written texts.

Cognitive verbs such as “think”, “need”, and “wonder” can also give children experience with both new vocabulary in the form of action-oriented verbs, but also syntactically complex sentence structures. These types of verbs often take a complement clause such as”that “or “if” to complete their meaning, as in”I think (that) the plant is growing”, or “I wonder if it will rain tonight “.   Helping children generate predictions and questions about scientific phenomena gives them experience and practice in using complement clauses.

Other Language Skills to Focus on Outdoors  

Besides the dimensions of vocabulary and syntax, there are other considerations for outdoor language. These include:

• Pragmatic language (social conversations like saying excuse me to pass someone on the trail, turn-taking)
• Narrative language (pretending to go on a Bear Hunt, retell of important outings)
• Print awareness (pointing out signs and maps)
• Phonemic and alphabet awareness (reading signs and maps)
• Reading motivation (class-made books about field trips and other outdoor excursions are highly salient and have context personalization)

Citizen science apps such as iNaturalist/Seek and the North Carolina Arboretum’s locale-specific ecoEXPLORE give children the opportunity to document and discuss their observations during outdoor time with other budding scientists. These apps can be used to scaffold rich discussion of outdoor observations, including Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary words and complex syntax for recording and evaluating predictions. They can also be used for supporting reading motivation for early decoders wanting to learn the names of favorite plants and animals.

Physical activity

Outdoor language and STEM learning are also connected to children’s levels of physical activity (Willoughby et al, 2021) and their executive function (Ribner et al., 2023). A child that is ready to learn about a STEM concept such as pollination, must have the relevant vocabulary (e.g., bee, flower, pollen) and be able to link this vocabulary to the broader concept of pollination and the ecosystem that supports the bee and the flower. Executive function is often described as consisting of attention, working memory, and inhibitory control, and for children to learn, they need to be cognitively and emotionally ready to take in and retain the relevant information. Thus, to learn about how plants are pollinated, a child must:

• Focus attention to take in information about the bee and flower.
• Inhibit attending to external distractions (a bird moving across field of vision) and internal distractions (emotions such as fear of being stung by the bee).
• Retain and remember what they have seen and learn to make connections (bees pollinate flowers, flowers support the bees, bees make honey).

Physical activity, and especially physical activity that occurs in natural outdoor contexts (Boere et al., 2023), has been shown to support children’s emergent executive function and emotion regulation, which undergirds much of STEM learning (Becker et al., 2014; Hansen Sandseter et al., 2023). Researchers recommend that young children (ages 3 to 5) should get at least three hours of natural physical activity each day. This time in physically active play is important because when children move and play, the heart pumps blood to the brain (Mulser and Moreau, 2023), and over time, this can help improve attention and inhibitory control (Christiansen et al., 2019).

Physical activity in outdoor contexts, particularly those with a measured degree of risk, are also linked to emotion regulation and prosocial skills (Cho et al., 2023; Hansen Sandseter et al., 2023). As a child faces a safe level of risk, such as the potential of being stung by a bee, or of skinning a knee when climbing a rock, mastery, self-confidence, and emotional control can develop. As these experiences occur with peers, children can learn to help support each other, experience this in return, and overcome fear. This can promote pragmatic language, social conversations, turn-taking, and strengthen prosocial skills.

Children also interact and learn in outdoor spaces through movement and exploration. Gross motor skills involve muscles of the torso, arms, and legs and are used to achieve a movement task such as jumping or climbing. Executive function and gross motor skills are important for exploring outdoor spaces, and participating in cognitively challenging motor activities is linked to improvement in executive function (Hudson et al., 2020). Over time, physical activity and risky play can strengthen a child’s executive function, self-control, and emotional control which are linked to school readiness and language development (Fitzpatrick et al., 2014; Imai et al., 2022).

Skills that might be supported by outdoor exploration include:

• Running
• Crawling
• Galloping
• Hopping
• Balancing
• Leaping
• Jumping side to side

In summary, outdoor environments offer a motivating and natural context for children and families with and without disabilities to build experience with vocabulary and complex syntax that support STEM reasoning, while also engaging in the kinds of physically active gross motor play that promote pragmatic language, executive function and later STEM skills. Examples of activities you can engage in with your young children outdoors and how they may support language and physical activity skills undergirding STEM can be found below!