Suitability of children’s outdoor Play environment in city ECD centers for their cognitive development

Abstract

Childhood play is so essential for children’s development. There is an emergent body of evidence supporting the robust link between cognitive competence and high-quality outdoor childhood play. This implies that the outdoor play space must be more than simply places for children to run around, it should have adequate play equipment to cater for the cognitive, physical, social and developmental needs of the children. Meaningful planning of the environment should be done in a suitable context to provide profound outdoor play is within the supervision of the instructors. This study aimed to investigate the status of outdoor play environments in Early Childhood Development (ECD) centers in relation to the cognitive development of the children. The main concern of the study was to establish whether the ECD outdoor play environments were suitable enough in terms of space, equipment and planning for the children’s cognitive development.The study was done in Kisumu city in Kenya. The city has 512 ECD centers with the majority of these being public and run by Parents Teachers Associations (PTAs). Purposive sampling was used to select all the 20 urban ECD centers within the city. Data was collected from the all the head teachers and the teachers in all the 20 selected centres by use of interviews, an event observation schedule and observation checklist. The data that was collected was mainly qualitative and thus was analyzed descriptively.According to the results of the study, ECD centers’ outdoor play environments did not accord opportunities for children’s cognitive development. Nearly all the outdoor play environments in the ECD centres had only equipment and materials for physical play not cognitive development.From the findings, the study recommends that the management of the ECD centres should plan for enough space, varied equipment and materials and design outdoor environment to enable children engage fully in outdoor play for their holistic development.In-service courses should also be facilitated through District Center for Early Childhood Education to refresh teachers on the role of outdoor play environment in children’s development.