Creating A Natural Outdoor Play Space: The Vision

When my daughter was in fourth grade and enamored of all things "Harry Potter," she and a group of her friends spent every recess for months digging in the dirt under a fire escape adjacent to the school playground. They were planting a "garden" in which to grow the elements they would need to make potions. They planted wild onions they dug up from the ground, clover, and anything they could find growing around the mostly-mulched play space. Behind them was a whole playground of equipment. But these children (including my daughter, who had grown up in the woods) eschewed what people had built for the little patch of neglected dirt that, along with their imaginations, was much more interesting to the nine year olds.

When first on an unfamiliar playground, children delight in exploring the challenges the equipment offers. But often, it seems, the opportunities grow old, and the children look for something new. Unfortunately, the equipment is static and cannot offer additional challenges. And when the children need a new challenge, they often create one...by subverting the "safety first" features of that carefully planned set of equipment and, say, climbing on the outside of the tower, or walking on top of the monkey bars. 

I had noticed that the five year olds in our Junior Kindergarten always seemed to ignore the physical challenges of our plastic climber and used it, with a good dose of imagination, only as a prop for their dramatic play. I also saw that most of the children's time outdoors was, instead, digging in the dirt or constructing with the little gifts the Magnolia and Sycamore trees dropped at their feet. Their most complex play was with sticks and seed pods and dandelions and pebbles...nature's "loose parts."  They dug holes and planted their sticks. They collected "food" for the animals they pretended to be. They made masks out of giant sycamore leaves. They turned over rocks and found sowbugs, for whom they spent hours making habitats and hunting for friends. The children played around the big plastic equipment, but the real "playground" was nature.

I wondered: what would the children do if we added to their loose parts? Our first response to that problem was to offer ropes and big pieces of cloth. 

Collecting these observations, constructing theories about children's relationship with nature, reading and collecting ideas, I dreamed for years about creating an intentional natural outdoor space for children's play. There was a tiny space that we used as an outdoor classroom right outside our classroom door. And there was our "playground," a walk and a street-crossing away. Those years of observing and imagining a play space more consistent with the way children play, unbeknownst to me, were an incubating period, a time of collecting ideas and honing my understanding of the children's relationship with the natural world.

And then...a huge branch fell in a summer storm. It demolished the plastic and metal playground equipment. It made no sense to replace the equipment in the same place;  the school was getting ready to use that space for construction of a new building. It seemed that our time had come. With a hopeful heart, I made a proposal to expand the tiny outdoor classroom right outside our building, and prepared to present the proposal in a meeting of the administrators charged with approving such things. When I presented the plan for a natural space for children, the adults in the room exclaimed, "I spent hours making rivers and dams when I was a child!" and "I had a treehouse!" and "That sounds like my childhood!"  A natural play space made sense to everyone, and the plan was approved. And so we began. 

Planning The New Outdoor Play Space

Early in the year and early in the planning process I asked the children to think about what they'd like to see in our new outdoor classroom. I expected them to connect with what we'd observed in the play of children in other years. But the old play space was gone. These children had never played with each other under the Sycamore and Magnolia trees. They had not co-constructed fairy houses in the hole at the bottom of the Magnolia tree. When asked to think together about play space design,their ideas were of amusement parks and man made equipment...roller coasters and monkey bars and merry-go-rounds. I decided to take the question back to the children again later in the year, after they’d had some experience playing with natural materials and loose parts and imagination. 

Meanwhile, the planning had to continue; we had to have a place to play. I met with a playground planner once or twice and found a landscape contractor who agreed to work with us, despite never having created quite such a play space before. The plan began to take shape.

The plan, constructed collaboratively between playground

designer, Missy Benson, landscape contractor, Gary McGuire,

and, speaking for the children, me.

I wanted the space to reflect our larger "place," a city through which a river runs over boulders, creating dramatic rapids...that has hills and forests and gardens. I wanted a place that would awaken the senses and that had scope for the imagination...a place that offered multiple perspectives on the world, and a place that was an extension of our indoor, Reggio-inspired classroom.

I found it fascinating that, when we did ask the children to help with the design again, a few months later, almost all of the children's requests were accommodated by the plan, except, perhaps, for the swings, which, as it turned out, became one of the child-constructed parts later on. In their outdoor classroom, the children wanted:

Swings!
Play with water...Water that’s moving.
A way to jump up high, like on a trampoline.
We want to feel like we’re flying. We want to pretend we’re flying with wings.
Relax in the sun and watch the clouds...somewhere to sit. A place to read.
Seashells in the sand and water.
Somewhere to draw with chalk.
We want to search with magnifying glasses.

We want to find bugs, look at them, and “experiment” about them.
Dirt, and logs in the dirt for bugs to go under. Places to have picnics, and a place to drink and

to sit. A place to read.

Seashells in the sand and water. Somewhere to draw with chalk.
We want to search with magnifying glasses.

We want to find bugs, look at them, and experiment about them.
Dirt, and logs in the dirt for bugs to go under. Places to have picnics, and a place to drink and rest.
Tree cookies.
Pond
Flowers
Logs for building a fence (There arose much excitement at this thought)
A tree house; a little house.
Something to make music outside. We could use the instruments from inside outside.
A place to work with clay outside, and a place to paint.