This information is brought to you by Slough Borough Council's Early Years team, on behalf of The Playlist, for the attention of all Early Years settings.
There is something about rain that seems to change how we think about being outside. On a dry day, the door is open, children are in and out, and the outdoor space is simply part of the provision. Add a bit of rain, and suddenly we can find ourselves looking out of the window, wondering whether it is really worth it. Obviously there are days when the weather genuinely makes being outside difficult, but quite often it isn’t the rain itself that is the problem. It is the extra clothes, the wet socks, the muddy floor and the general faff of getting everybody out and back in again.
The thing is, rain has not ruined the outdoor provision. In lots of ways it has made it more interesting. Everything the children knew about that space yesterday has shifted slightly. The sand behaves differently, the ground feels different underfoot, water starts moving through places where there was no water before, and perfectly ordinary bits of provision suddenly begin doing things they didn’t do on a dry day. Rather than seeing rain as something we have to work around, it is worth looking at what it has just added.
The same outdoor space can feel completely different after a good bit of rain. Sand that was loose and easy to scoop can suddenly become heavy and sticky; puddles appear in dips and hollows that children may never have noticed before; and chalk, soil, leaves, wheels, and pathways all behave differently. Water collects, runs, soaks in, overflows and makes familiar materials respond in unfamiliar ways. Without us adding a single new resource, the rain has already altered the provision and given children a whole new set of things to notice and explore.
Much of my work around continuous provision has been about looking carefully at what an environment allows children to do. Not simply what resources are there, but what children can move, combine, transform, transport, build with and investigate. Rain changes many of those possibilities without us having to add anything. The same sand, blocks, guttering, buckets and wheeled toys can suddenly offer a very different experience because the conditions have changed.
The Department for Education continues to make clear that young children need regular access to outdoor experiences, and Development Matters includes puddles, mud and changing natural materials among the kinds of things children should have opportunities to explore. Research also consistently finds that young children tend to be more physically active outside than indoors, although the quality of the environment and what children can do within it matters enormously. Simply opening the door is not enough. What matters is what children can actually do once they get through it.
Rain can give us more possibilities, not fewer. A puddle, for example, holds a surprising amount of science. A child pouring water down a length of guttering, watching it disappear into gravel, filling a hole in the mud or noticing that one puddle lasts longer than another is beginning to build ideas about how materials and forces behave. They are exploring movement, speed, weight, depth, absorption, flow and change. They certainly do not need us to introduce the word permeability while they are standing there in their waterproof trousers, but they do need repeated opportunities to see what happens when they act on the world.
That links closely to the thinking behind Common Play Behaviours. I am much more interested in what children are actually trying to do than in the activity we think we have provided. A child might repeatedly pour, transport, fill, empty, block, channel or redirect water. Those repeated behaviours tell us something about what they are interested in finding out. The rain has simply given them a new material to work with.
The adult role here matters because this kind of play is incredibly easy to overteach. A child pours water into a pipe and, before you know it, an adult appears with a clipboard, asking how many cups it will take to fill the jug standing nearby. There may be a place for that, but often it is much more useful to notice what the child is already thinking and add language to it.
‘That came out much faster.’ ‘The water has soaked into the sand.’ ‘That one is overflowing.’
Those sorts of comments give children words for things they are already seeing and feeling without turning the experience into a test. Sometimes we might add another piece of guttering, a larger container or something that could block the flow. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is stand back and allow the child to continue.
This is something I come back to a lot when I talk about continuous provision. We do not need to keep filling spaces with things we have thought up for children to do. Often, the real skill is noticing what is already there, what possibilities it holds, and deciding whether stepping in will help the play move on or simply get in the way.
Rain also changes the physical demands of play. A full bucket of water is heavier than an empty one. Wet sand takes more effort to move. Mud creates resistance. Jumping into a puddle requires children to judge distance, force and balance. Moving across a damp or uneven surface may cause them to slow down, change their foot position or use their arms differently to steady themselves. Their bodies constantly gather information and adjust.
This matches much of what I have written about physical development in Getting Ready to Write, Dough Gym, Funky Fingers and elsewhere. Physical development does not happen only when we set up a specific physical activity. Children develop strength, balance, coordination and control through all sorts of everyday experiences, and wet-weather play can change the physical challenge of a familiar environment in quite subtle ways.
Of course, none of this means that wet weather is always suitable. Adults still need to make sensible judgements about temperature, strong winds, icy surfaces, deep water and other risks. What matters is recognising the difference between something being uncomfortable and something being unsafe. Wet does not automatically mean dangerous.
For some children, though, being wet may genuinely be very uncomfortable. Enthusiasm for ‘all-weather play’ can occasionally turn into an expectation that every child should be delighted by the chance to get muddy, and that is no more helpful than keeping everybody inside. Some children dislike wet sleeves or cold hands. Some find rain on their face unpleasant. The sound of rain hitting a waterproof hood can feel very loud. A child may be interested in investigating rain while staying under cover, using containers, pipes or brushes rather than standing in the middle of it.
That is still rainy-day play. Good provision gives children different ways to take part, rather than suggesting there is one correct way to enjoy the weather.
There is also the rather less glamorous side of wet-weather provision, where theory meets thirty pairs of wellies. Rainy-day play is much easier when the practical systems actually work. Waterproof clothing needs to be easy to find and, as far as possible, easy for children to begin managing themselves. Wet clothes need somewhere to go. Spare socks are worth their weight in gold. If it takes twenty minutes and three adults to get everybody outside, it is hardly surprising that some days the door remains firmly shut.
Research with Early Years practitioners has found that weather, clothing and the practical effort involved in getting children ready can become genuine barriers to outdoor play. That does not mean practitioners do not value being outside. It means the systems around outdoor play matter as much as our good intentions.
There is useful learning in those routines too. Pulling on waterproof trousers, finding the right boot, managing a coat, working a zip and trying to discover why one leg appears to have vanished somewhere inside a pair of overtrousers all involve independence, coordination and problem-solving. It is not always speedy learning, admittedly, and it rarely looks as calm as we might like, but it still counts.
When I think about wet-weather provision, one question I find particularly useful is: What has the rain changed? It is not really a question for us to fire at the children. It is a question for us to use when we look at the environment.
What has happened to the sand? Where is the water gathering? What has become heavier? What now moves differently? What is soaking up the water and what is not? Where is the water travelling? What happens when children dig, build, carry, pour, push or paint in these conditions?
Looking at the environment in this way means we are less likely to feel that we need to invent a collection of special ‘rainy-day activities’. Sometimes an adult-planned experience can be useful, but often the most interesting possibilities are already sitting within the provision. The rain has simply changed them.
That also fits with the way I think about enhancements more generally. We don’t need to keep adding things just to make provision look different. An enhancement should extend what children can already do, respond to something we have noticed or create a worthwhile new possibility. In wet weather, the environment itself has often done some of that work for us.
The activities that follow are therefore ideas rather than a rainy-day checklist. Choose the ones that fit your children and your space. Adapt them, combine them or leave some out completely. Put something into the environment and see what the children actually do with it, because they may well use it in a way you had not thought of.
Rain is temporary, unpredictable and open-ended. It changes familiar spaces, alters materials and gives children new problems to solve. In Britain, we are going to get plenty of it whether we like it or not, so it seems a bit wasteful to spend all that time waiting for it to stop.