Outdoor Education
Adventure Care has an Adventure Activities License (AALA) that enables the company to provide numerous adventure activities to young people under the age of 18 pursuant Activity Centres (Young person's Safety) Act 1995 and the Adventure Activities Licensing Regulations 1996. www.aala.org
Outdoor education is utilised alongside the therapeutic methods of the staff and the education programme to identify the young people's strengths and help them to reach achievable goals. Many of these activities are extremely challenging, but are designed to give the young person a sense of achievement and growth. That helps to improve the self esteem and confidence of the young people, when they see that they can succeed, when they believe they cannot or are scared. These activities also help to build up trust of other's and learn to work as part of a team. The young people seem to thrive on these demanding activities, where they often start to really enjoy them and the benefits are shown in other areas of the programme. It is not uncommon for the young people to become keen on a particular activity, such as climbing and join a local club.
Hands on learning is provided through outdoor activities that gives the young people a chance to face real challenge. This in turn can accelerate learning different things such as; skills, discipline, self reliance and organisation.
There is a big choice of adventurous activities, such as:
- Indoor and outdoor climbing
- Bouldering
- Mountaineering
- Kayaking
- Horse riding and stable management
- Abseiling
- Surfing and body boarding
- Snorkelling
- Jet skiing
- Fishing
- Caving
- Cooking
- White water rafting
- Improvised role-playing
- Camping
- Hill walking
- Gorge walking
- Orienteering and map reading
- Swimming, indoor and out
- Go-karting
- Quadding
- Archery
- Arts and crafts
- Snowboarding
- Skiing
- Football
- Sailing
- Canadian canoeing
- Cooperative games
In short outdoor activities can enhance the young people's:
- Confidence - as they achieve things they thought they couldn't. Creating positive feelings and feelings the young person wants to recreate again.
- Health - increased amount of exercise improves health and gets the young person into the routine of exercising and hopefully long term activities.
- Lifestyle - the young people find new hobbies and interests and alternatives to negative activities.
- Pleasure/ Excitement. People need varying levels of stimulation to feel alive. Outdoor activities can provide this stimulation, from enjoyment to adrenalin high.
- Goal setting/achieving. As confidence increases with success, young person is able to work towards more challenging, yet achievable goals. Facilitating a positive cycle for the future.
- Discipline - young person see that they must focus and follow guidelines for safety and success.
- Teamwork - the young person will soon see that they must work together for safety and to achieve goals, also to help others achieve goals, learning to encourage other's.
- Communication skills - ensuring they can follow directions to ensure safety and help team members.
- Knowledge of the environment - learning about the outdoor world through practical activities.
We also make use of local facilities, such as; squash, badminton, table tennis and basketball.
Adventure Care have created links within the community to allow access to clubs such as climbing, swimming and cadets.