Outdoor Free Play Essay

Though many studies have emphasised the importance of outdoor free play on children’s social and emotional development, there has not been much research on how the lack of outdoor free play can affect children’s social and emotional development. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the following research question:
How does the duration of outdoor free play affect the interaction skills of children ages three to four years old?
Methodology/ Research Design For the purpose of this research, we intend to investigate how children communicate and build relationships with others in outdoor free play, over the course of one month.
Settings
This research will take place in three different child care centres located in different
Both qualitative and quantitative data will be collected to assess children’s social skills in terms of their interaction with their peers and teachers. The tools will guide us in understanding parents’ and teachers’ perspectives on outdoor free play and provide concrete evidences of children’s socio-emotional development while participating in outdoor free play. With this considerations in mind, semi-structured interviews, observations, rating scales and questionnaires will be used. Semi-structured interviews. Firstly, core teachers from the three child care centres will be interviewed to gain a better understanding of their perspectives on outdoor free play. This small group interview will take about 45 minutes to an hour to provide sufficient time for each participant to share their thoughts. We will start off by introducing the main topic of the research before moving on to a series of open- and close-ended questions pertaining to the participants’ beliefs (refer to Appendix 2a). Having open-ended questions allows participants to share additional ideas of their personal value related to the various aspects of outdoor free play while close-ended questions provide “thinking time” and clarification moments about their stand on the topic (Patton,
We will observe the focus children to get first-hand observations of their interactions with their peers and teachers which will provide us with their natural behaviours. Observations enrich the interview process by providing more factual evidences to support teachers’ statements and beliefs. Through observations, we can check for nonverbal expression of feelings, capture how children interact and communicate with one another and check how much time is spent on each activity (Kawulich, 2005; Patton, 2015). Therefore, observations are used for this research to increase validity and reliability since we can have a better understanding of the