Help Playful green planet flourish
Are you a Fellow? Join the Playful green planet Circle community. Help us create nature-based learning for young children in urban areas that build connections with nature and community.
Cultivating children’s climate action and social activism
Radically reconnecting children to nature, creativity and community.
Playful green planet is an ambitious intervention to transform how primary schools and early years settings foster a connection to nature and community through creativity.
In partnership with the Eden Project, Bath Spa University, House of Imagination and HundrED, we’re seeking funding partners to help us realise this bold new vision for whole-school and whole-place settings.
Early childhood educators observed improved socialisation, problem-solving, focus, self-regulation, creativity and self-confidence, and reduced stress, boredom and injury. Outdoor play spaces are important for promoting children's wellbeing and development.
A solid, growing evidence base shows nature-immersed play brings huge benefits to early childhood development, wellbeing and understanding, and respecting our connection and interdependence with nature and the environment.
There are three pillars of children’s development into citizens that Playful green planet will help support:
There is a crisis of children’s connection to nature, especially in cities and towns. This is further influenced by factors including race, disability and socioeconomic status. Here are some telling statistics:
Establishing community connections has a positive effect on wider learning environments, improving school attendance and even reducing exclusions.
We also know that creative opportunities for many children are under threat.
Playful green planet will design and deliver place-based activities that encourage learning through play and access to nature. Global in its long-term ambition, we will pilot this work in the UK, creating curricula, learning tools, and access to nature sites to support early years settings, using the opportunities in the natural world to support future change agents.
Working with children, families, educators and communities we will co-design and co-create biodiverse habitats for play – mini-Edens and ‘forests of imagination’ – in primary schools and early years settings, catalysing innovative activity programmes, teacher training and whole-school culture change.
Our Playful green planet partners have extensive experience delivering transformative interventions for younger children’s life outcomes through connection to nature, development of creativity, and social action in the local community. We’re excited to be collaborating on a radical new vision for education and whole school growth and change.
Are you a Fellow? Join the Playful green planet Circle community. Help us create nature-based learning for young children in urban areas that build connections with nature and community.
Blog
Rebecca Ford Alessandra Tombazzi Penny Hay
Our Playful green planet team summarises a ‘lunch and learn’ at RSA House that focused on how the influence of nature can benefit a child’s development.
Blog
Hannah Breeze
We asked 2,000 primary educators to share their attitudes, motivations and the potential benefits of delivering youth social action in the classroom.