Taking Preschool Students Outside to Support Executive Function

Lately, the education and business worlds have renewed their focus on executive functioning skills, the “soft skills” that enable people to work as part of a team, flexibly adapt to changes, and better participate in life.

Executive functioning is often seen as a social and emotional skill. However, executive functioning skills, like utilizing working memory, self-regulation, and cognitive flexibility, also underpin academic skills. In order to grasp academic concepts, children need to manage both the excitement and frustration that come with learning something new. It’s important for them to be able to focus on a given task and block out unnecessary external stimuli so that their working memories can organize incoming information.

Over time, they develop the cognitive flexibility to adapt and problem-solve according to changing circumstances and desired outcomes. Strong executive functioning skills enable children to respond calmly to challenges and adversity. They are the tools of perseverance and flexible thinking.

Natural Settings Can Support Executive Functioning Skills

I find that nature provides an ever-changing and unpredictable environment for children to gain these tools.

You can set up an art challenge where all the materials, including adhesives, need to be sourced from the outdoor environment. For example, inspired by Andy Goldsworthy’s art, preschool students can use tree sap or fern stems to attach leaves to ephemeral designs on the forest floor. Or invite children to sort and categorize the nature they find on the ground according to their own rules. You can compare their sorts from season to season. These tasks help children problem-solve, use their working memories, and organize information. Sometimes, the problem to be solved could be as simple as how to keep their papers from blowing away in windy weather; this unconsciously develops resiliency.

The power of learning in nature is that these executive functioning skills don’t have to be explicitly taught. They are always working in the background as children contend with weather elements or varied walking terrain.

In his book Nature and the Mind, Marc Berman, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, explains that a walk in nature activates involuntary attention—where interesting patterns and sounds invite focus that does not need to be actively concentrated in any single direction. It focuses the mind in a gentle way and allows the brain to make connections beneath our level of conscious attention. Berman’s research found that simply walking in nature improves memory and cognition, and a 2024 public health review recommends nature exposure in conjunction with other treatments for children with ADHD.

In order to achieve regular executive functioning gains, children need regular doses of outdoor time. Routine, weekly or even daily, extended time for outdoor learning allows children to experience changes in nature over time and elicits their curiosity and motivation for investigation.

Outdoor Learning Supports Critical Thinking and Self-Regulation

Julie Ernst, a professor of applied human sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and Firdevs Burçak, a professor of early childhood education at Istanbul University, used a “curiosity box” with children who attend nature preschools and those who attend traditional indoor preschools. Children were handed a box of items they had never seen before, and researchers noted how they engaged with the items. The children in nature preschools showed significantly more experimentation and information-seeking behaviors than children in indoor settings.

At my preschool, Wildwood Nature School, children generate offbeat questions like, “Do spiders have feelings?” “How do new trees grow if no person plants their seeds?” “Where do colors come from?” “How do birds keep their eggs from breaking?” My role as an educator is to guide their observations and experiments to find the answers to their own questions about nature so that they develop foundations for designing their own future explorations.

Another of Ernst’s studies shows that children learn self-regulation best in outdoor environments. While all of the preschool students included in the study showed positive increases in children’s initiative taking, problem-solving, and flexibility while at school, only the children in nature preschools showed positive increases in self-regulation. The children in nature preschools transferred their new skills from the school environment to the home environment. You do not have to teach at a nature school to help students develop these skills.

The flexibility of a natural environment allows children to choose the level of stimuli that works best for their self-regulation. For example, I coach children who are bothered by the noise and activity common to a preschool classroom to find a quiet spot under a tree to relax with a book until their nervous system resets. Conversely, I encourage children who need more stimuli to take advantage of the wide-open spaces to run, climb, or move far away from others to be loud and receive the extra sensory input created by nature.

Teachers are always looking for simple ways to boost children’s academic growth. As the research shows, outdoor time doesn’t need to be complicated to produce the gains in memory, cognition, and self-regulation that lead to better academic performance. So build in some regular time for your class to do scavenger hunts connected to whatever topic you are covering, create some art with natural treasures they collect from the ground, do some nature journaling, or simply take a 10-minute walk in nature before returning to the classroom. Their brains will be better wired to tackle difficult tasks.