A new daycare in Kanata that’s exploring the benefits of outdoor play is pushing for looser regulations around the amount of time children can spend outside.
The Forest Explorers Outdoor Learning Centre officially launched on Monday. It’s part of a five-year initiative called the Canadian Centre for Outdoor Play and will serve as a demonstration site for outdoor play practice, research and policy.
The initiative is a collaboration between Andrew Fleck Children’s Services, Outdoor Play Canada, the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group at the CHEO Research Institute and Algonquin College.
The centre is located inside Wesley Clover Park and has play and learning areas, large windows and is surrounded by forest.
Educators have long discussed the benefits of children learning in nature, but there’s still not enough research on the subject, according to Louise De Lannoy, executive director of Outdoor Play Canada.
“These are … things that we’ve heard over time and very casually, but … it’s not recorded [or] documented in a formal way that can then be presented to policymakers, to those making the decisions,” De Lannoy said.
One stumbling block, however, is the province’s current licensing regime.
The centre is licensed under the Child Care and Early Years Act, which means the property and daycare programs must adhere to multiple regulations involving the building, furnishings, playgrounds, records, staff education, nutrition and programming.
Program supervisor Tammy Potter said some of those requirements are too strict and limit outdoor activities.
“We’re hoping to eventually integrate eating lunch out on the land, potentially sleeping out on the land. But for now, we are required to be in our licensed space for 50 per cent of the time, so we will be doing that,” she said.
The province does not set out any specific requirements for forest or nature programs, but licensees are still required to meet all other requirements including having physical premises with a civic address and complying with local bylaws.
She said relaxing current licensing requirements could allow for another 40 spaces at the nearby Andrew Fleck Children’s Services Ottawa Forest and Nature School.
Children will spend half of their day outside playing, learning and exploring. The goal is for participants to spend as much time as they can in nature and will involve research aimed at proving the benefits of outdoor education.
In order to achieve this goal, outdoor equipment including snowsuits is available at no cost to each child, eliminating financial barriers to safe outside play.
Researchers will measure the impact of the Forest Explorers program on the physical, mental, emotional, social and environmental well-being of the children and compare those results to traditional daycare programs.
“We’re going to put GoPros on the kids and we’ve actually pilot-tested this data so that we gain first-person perspectives from kids on how they navigate outdoor spaces,” De Lannoy said.
Forest Explorers offers licensed programs for infants, toddlers and preschoolers, with 73 daycare spaces for children in Ottawa.
Since Ontario signed on to the national $10-a-day childcare program two years ago, demand for licensed spots has skyrocketed.
Potter said Forest Explorers currently has 400 names on a waitlist of families seeking childcare in the next six months. Others on the waitlist won’t need care until 2026.