Leik og språkleik i uterummet. Rapport prosjekt Språkjungelen.

This study examines how an adventure playground can be a place for language development at preschools ("barnehage") in Norway. An adventure playground in this context is an outdoor playground with different activity options. Play is viewed as a learning arena for children's motor development, social skills and not least language development.

The language jungle is an outdoor adventure playground with different language-developing activities incorporated in the playground such as magnetic boards with words, pictures and concepts the children can use during play. The adventure playground gave rise to many different play activities – both organised and spontaneous. These play activities include role-playing, rule games, team games and sing-a-longs. The evaluation shows that the adventure playground encourages the children to communicate with one another and is part of the children's play and language use. For example, the children learn new words about animals, they play with words, come up with new words or they practice counting. The adventure playground not only stimulates the children's use and understanding of language, it also contributes to developing the children's motor and social skills. The evaluation indicates that the work with the language jungle has developed continuously over time, and has been very time-consuming for the staff. For example, they have spent time on building the adventure playground and developing materials for the playground.  The project has also contributed to staff working more on language awareness and language-development activities at the adventure playground have spread to more activities at the preschool. Moreover, the project has created a greater sense of community among the staff.

The study is an evaluation of a project called Sprogjunglen (language jungle) aiming to stimulate and strengthen children's language skills through motor play at an adventure playground. The study was carried out at a Norwegian preschool. The study is described as interactive action research. Data consists of interviews with three assistant teachers and three preschool teachers carried out at the beginning and at the end of the evaluation. Moreover, the empirical data consists of notes from observations of children's activities in the language jungle and from other outside places used by the preschool. The study was conducted from 2010-2013. The evaluation involves relevant research literature about children, play and language.

Wie, A. (2014): ”Leik og språkleik i uterummet. Rapport prosjekt Språkjungelen”. Fredrikke, Højskolen i Nesla