Well, I actually have one, but I'm hoping to keep it short.
We've started work on designing and building a nature playground here at the nature centre. The whole idea of nature or natural playgrounds is to create spaces out of largely natural materials that encourage physical, unstructured, and creative play while helping kids want to be outside. The playgrounds are built in such a way that, although they're made from non-traditional materials, they're still safety certified. It's going to be a fantastic space for us to use both in programs and informally, and at this stage at least I'm pretty excited.
What you see above, though, was my nature playground as a kid.
It's just a vacant lot behind the house that the owners never bothered to clear. The town cut a road allowance (probably before I was born) but the road was never built. What remained, then, was a path and trees. We were in it all the time. We built forts; we made up stuff.
And we were outside. Even me, the incredibly neurotic kid who couldn't have bugs on her, went outside and played in the trees.
Kids don't do that now, and it's sad. If kids are outside at all, it's structured and "safe" and damned near cocooned. It's like kids today are wrapped up in plastic.
You should see what happens to our plastic kids when we take them out on the trails, though. They get interested. They get dirty and don't care. They open up (I had a teacher the other day who said that one boy who'd been chattering to me the whole time about the stuff he was finding barely says two words in class). There's all kinds of studies out now about how being outside in nature can help with everything from ADHD to autism, but to me that doesn't matter as much as the fact that being outside just feels good.
Hopefully our constructed nature playground will be a step in helping kids AND their overprotective parents (helicopter, anyone?) to see that.
Yeah, nice short post, Dee.
No comments:
Post a Comment