What Your Child Is Actually Learning When They Play Outside This Summer
By Lisa Chaplinsky, Town & Country Early Learning Centers
Every July, something shifts in our classrooms. The doors open a little wider, the mornings move outside a little faster, and the learning gets louder in the best possible way. At our full-day daycare in Middletown, CT and childcare centers in Southington and Colchester, children who spend their summers running, digging, building, and exploring aren’t just burning energy. They are doing some of the most important developmental work of their early years, and most of it looks nothing like school.
I’ve been part of the Town & Country family for years, and one of the things I hear most from parents in the summer months is some version of “she just played outside all day.” Said like an apology. Said like maybe the day didn’t count.
It counted. Here’s what was actually happening: “When a child spends the morning outside, she isn’t taking a break from learning. She is doing some of the hardest learning of her day.”
What Outdoor Learning Looks Like at an Early Learning Center Connecticut Families Trust
Outdoor play gives children direct, unfiltered access to the natural world, and the research on what that does for young minds is hard to overstate. The American Academy of Pediatrics published a clinical report confirming that play, including unstructured outdoor play, is essential for healthy brain development and is directly linked to advances in social-emotional learning, executive function, and physical health. (Yogman et al., 2018, Pediatrics.)
When a child crouches down to study a roly-poly bug, turns over a rock, or fills a bucket with wet sand and watches it collapse, they are building the observation and hypothesis skills that Connecticut’s Early Learning and Development Standards identify as foundational to scientific thinking and school readiness Connecticut goals. At Town & Country, our Building Blocks of Learning® curriculum connects outdoor time directly to these domains. Teachers aren’t standing back watching children play. They are asking questions, recording what they see in each child’s digital portfolio, and connecting those moments to what that child is working on developmentally right now.
One reason families choose a licensed childcare center over a summer camp or home-based care is exactly this: the outdoor environment at a quality childcare Connecticut facility is intentional. Every yard, every garden bed, every morning on the playground is planned and observed by a lead teacher with a CDA credential or ECE degree who knows your child’s developmental goals by name.
Why Full-Day Summer Childcare in Connecticut Builds More Than Academics
Physical play and emotional development are more connected than most parents realize. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has spent decades documenting the link between active physical play and a child’s ability to manage frustration, read social cues, and regulate their own emotions. A child who navigates the outdoor environment, figures out how to climb something that felt too high, or works out a disagreement over who gets the hula hoop, is practicing exactly the skills that kindergarten teachers say matter most on day one.
Our Here We Move® program runs every single day at all three of our Connecticut childcare centers in Middletown, Southington, and Colchester, because we believe what the research confirms: children learn better when their bodies have been used. In July and August, that daily movement often moves outside entirely, and the learning goes with it.
“The children who arrive at kindergarten most ready are almost always the ones who spent their summers moving, building, and figuring things out on their own.”
What Summer Outdoor Play Does for Social Development at a Full-Day Preschool programs in CT based in Middletown, Southington, and Colchester
Consistent with NAEYC accreditation CT standards, their position statement on developmentally appropriate practice identifies social competence as one of the most critical outcomes of early childhood education. And the place where social competence gets built, tested, and refined is not a worksheet. It’s the unscripted negotiation of outdoor play. Who goes first. What the rules are. What happens when someone feels left out.
This summer, at all three of our year-round daycare and preschool centers in Middletown, Southington, and Colchester, children are spending more time in mixed-age outdoor settings, where a four-year-old learns from watching a five-year-old solve a problem, and the five-year-old learns something about patience and leadership in the process.
This is one of the advantages of a year-round licensed childcare program over a seasonal alternative. The relationships between children don’t reset in September. The teachers who know your child in July are the same ones building on that knowledge in October, and the outdoor learning that happens all summer feeds directly into the classroom work that follows.
Three Things Parents of Toddlers and Preschoolers in Connecticut Can Do Outside This July
You don’t need a curriculum or a lesson plan. You need fifteen minutes and a willingness to follow your child’s lead.
Go on a nature walk and bring a bag. Let your child collect whatever catches their attention. Leaves, rocks, a feather, a stick. When you get home, lay it all out and ask them to sort it by color, by size, by texture, or by whatever category they invent. Sorting is a foundational math and cognitive skill, and your child will do it with total commitment if the materials came from a walk they took themselves.
Give them a real job outside. Watering a plant, sweeping the porch, washing a window with a spray bottle. Children this age are not playing at work. They are working, and the satisfaction of a completed real task builds the kind of executive function and self-regulation that researchers at Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child identify as among the most important predictors of long-term success. (Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, 2011.)
Let them be bored for ten minutes. This one is harder for parents than it is for children. Unstructured time, without a screen or a planned activity, is where creativity lives. Give them space, stay nearby, and watch what they build.
Why Year-Round Licensed Childcare meeting CT childcare regulations Is Different From Seasonal Summer Care
July goes fast, and August arrives before most Connecticut families are ready for it. The weeks your child spends outside this summer, chasing fireflies, running through sprinklers, building something in the backyard that falls apart and gets built again, those weeks are not a gap in their education. They are part of it.
At Town & Country Early Learning Centers, we are open Monday through Friday, 6:30 AM to 6:00 PM, year-round, which means your child’s learning never stops, and neither does ours. If you’re looking for full-day summer childcare in Middletown, Southington, or Colchester, we’d love to have you come in for a tour and see what a summer morning looks like in one of our classrooms. Call us or stop by anytime.
Sources:
Yogman M, Garner A, Hutchinson J, Hirsh-Pasek K, Golinkoff RM; AAP Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health; AAP Council on Communications and Media. “The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children.” Pediatrics. 2018. / Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University. “Building the Brain’s ‘Air Traffic Control’ System: How Early Experiences Shape the Development of Executive Function.” 2011. / NAEYC. “Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth Through Age 8.” 4th edition, 2022.
