Homegrown Children’s Habitats is a professional development course for Family Child Care Home (FCCH) providers, educators, and consultants. Participants examine family child care outdoor spaces and practices, use research on nature play, learn to make informed decisions, and discover practical improvements that would fit a home-based, mixed-age child care setting. This course is worth 10 Contact Hour Credits (CHCs) from NC DCDEE.

This Course Aims To:

• Ground providers in “Family Style” outdoor experiences and offer guidance to manage outdoor safety, risk, and regulation while informing how to create natural, affordable settings for their own outdoor environments.
• Build providers’ capacity to design a backyard play landscape including circulation and layout, plants and shade, edible gardens, and affordable play settings using evidence.
• Support providers in planning age-responsive outdoor programming and intentional adult practice for mixed-age groups (0-12) within a single home- based program.
• Empower providers to run all-weather operations, engage families, and achieve long-term success through realistic, phased (incremental) improvement plans.

This Course Contains 5 Modules:

1. Module 1: The Home-Based Mixed Age Groups and Nature
2. Module 2: Family Style Backyards: Layout, circulation, multi-age activity areas
3. Module 3: One Habitat for Every Age: Defining Play and Learning Settings
4. Module 4: Outdoor Programming for Mixed Ages (0-12 years old)
5. Module 5: Incremental Development and Family Engagement

Learning Outcomes

After completing the course, participants will be able to:

1. Assess and enhance nature-rich outdoor play and learning environments.
2. Use design ideas for creating edible gardens and play settings for
   mixed-age groups.
3. Implement all-weather and family engagement activities.
4. Create a phased Action Plan to sustain daily outdoor practice.