Nature Nurture: Watching Resilience Grow (eBook)

This e-book is designed to help you, whether you're a professional or a parent, observe and track children’s development across seven key areas while they engage in outdoor activities. It will not only highlight the immense value of outdoor experiences for your child’s learning, development, health, and well-being but also demonstrate how these activities play a crucial role in building resilience.

Resilience, the ability to bounce back from challenges, seems increasingly scarce in today’s nurseries and schools. Many children struggle to cope with adversity, finding it harder to recover from setbacks. This growing concern has been noted by professionals across the UK and other developed nations. In 2015, Wilson described this trend among US college students as an "epidemic of anguish."

At Nature Nurture, we work with some of the most vulnerable children and witness firsthand the transformative power of nature, nurture, and play in building resilience. Since 2010, we've dedicated ourselves to understanding resilience and developing a tool to observe children's strengths while helping them overcome barriers to their healthy development. Our approach is holistic and strengths-based, focused on fostering resilience in every child.

This observation tool has been tried and tested over the past 14 years in Nature Nurture sessions and has been adapted for use at Mucky Boots Outdoor Nursery in Aberdeenshire. Its success has inspired us to share it with educators, early years practitioners, childcare professionals, social workers, and anyone passionate about taking children outdoors to play regularly. We hope this tool becomes as valuable to you as it has been for us, and we encourage you to share your experiences with us as you use it.

Above all, remember to have fun and let the children lead. The outdoors is their playground, and through it, they will show you what they need to thrive, be happy, strong, and resilient.