Learn French through Nature exploration
How do we balance
Free Play and Guided activities?
The Benefits of Free Play
Free play lies at the heart of how children naturally learn and grow. Through spontaneous, joyful play, they are intrinsically motivated to explore, experiment, and deepen their understanding of the world around them. Trial and error become powerful tools for developing essential cognitive skills like problem-solving, decision-making, and creative thinking. Free play also fosters social cooperation. As children negotiate, collaborate, resolve conflicts, and make shared decisions, they strengthen their ability to relate to others. These peer interactions nurture emotional self-regulation and help build empathy, patience, and resilience.
Imaginative play supports language development. As children communicate with one another, sharing ideas, proposing solutions, and asking questions, they expand their vocabulary and improve their sentence structure in a natural, meaningful context.
Free outdoor play contributes to physical development as well, enhancing gross and fine motor skills, coordination, and muscular strength.
Through hands-on exploration of the natural world, children form a deep connection with the environment and develop lasting respect for all living things.
Most importantly, free play allows children to apply and integrate what they’ve learned, giving their skills the space to grow, take root, and flourish in lasting and authentic ways.
Guided Group Activities
Alongside free play, children participate in structured group activities guided by the teacher. These moments are designed to support collaborative learning, critical thinking, and language development. Through collective scientific inquiry, they co-construct knowledge exploring shared questions, discuss their ideas, and reflect on the outcomes of their investigations, learning to articulate what they have discovered. Children also engage in cooperative games, whether solving riddles, playing board games, or participating in team-based activities, that foster collaboration, turn-taking, and strategic thinking.
Other key moments involve calming practices: learning to observe attentively, listen with presence, and relax. These peaceful transitions support children in developing focus, self-awareness, and emotional regulation, while also offering essential mental rest that supports healthy brain function and memory consolidation. In these quiet moments, children ground themselves deeply in their environment, nurturing a sense of belonging and presence that enriches their overall learning experience.
Oral and written language skills are woven throughout the activities, through storytelling, songs, vocabulary games, explanations of natural phenomena, note-taking, drafting conclusions, and creating displays that showcase the knowledge gained through their research, among many other rich opportunities for expression.