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Winnetka Community Nursery School Builds a Playground: A Collaborative Experience in the Creation of an Ideal
By Kathy Hardy, M.Ed.

Last year I had the wonderful opportunity as the director of Winnetka Community Nursery School to redesign our school playground.   I invited everyone in our preschool community to participate,including parents, teachers, the community at large and, of course, the children who are our experts on outdoor play.

It was a wonderful experience for all of us and, aside from the positive benefits of a newly created space, we also reexamined our philosophy and really took a look at the many benefits to be gained through outdoor play.  

Anyone who has designed or built a playground (think even about all the

logistics of putting a play structure in your own backyard) knows it is a daunting task.   There are many questions to ask.   Should we make our purchases from playground catalogs or build our own equipment?   What about liability?   What materials should we use: wood, metal, fiberglass, recycled plastic, laminated plywood, polyethylene?   What are the federal standards we must follow?   What about special needs requirements and accessibility?   Licensing regulations?   And what fall zone (the biggest buzz word when thinking about equipment needs) materials should we use?   But before any of these issues were addressed we all asked, "What should an outdoor space include, and what do we want the space to look like for our children?"  

Early childhood educators know that the best outdoor play space is a safe replica of the natural, outdoor environment many of us enjoyed growing up--a variety of textures, materials, gardens, loose parts such as sticks, logs, stones, pinecones, bark, water, things to create and spaces for open-ended play opportunities.   A good outdoor environment needs to provide all children who use it with the opportunities for a variety of play:   physical, social, constructive, and dramatic.   Good outdoor play and learning environments replicate nature and allow children to experiment, take risks, discover, control, build, and are responsive to each and every child.  

A good outdoor play and learning environment includes climbing structures, opportunities for wheeled toys, sandboxes, dramatic and creative play structures, places to hide, be alone and areas to play in a group.   Designing this optimal space outdoors can be a very complex process.

What do children gain from outdoor play?

The very first step we took was to identify our values and goals.   Aside from the obvious benefits of exercise, what else do young children gain from outdoor play?   We know that young children have more opportunities for extensive gross-motor movement outdoors and more opportunities to be loud and make lots of noise.   But there is also room for social, physical, and cognitive development as they act on their environment and see what kinds of outcomes their physical actions produce.   There are also opportunities for emotional development as children test their limits and challenge themselves to try things that may be just at the edge of their reach.   Their success leads to feelings of accomplishment and positive self-esteem.

Childhood memories

When we all gathered to share our very own childhood memories, it was not surprising that most of us had recollections of swinging on swings, digging in the mud and sand, trying to dig a hole through the center of the earth, playing hide and seek, climbing in trees, digging for worms, walking through gardens, jumping in puddles, catching insects, lying in grass and looking at the sky and sitting on the warm ground and watching the world go by.  

One of my personal favorite memories as a young child was when my mother laid a hula hoop on the grass, handed me a magnifying glass, and invited me to discover the "little world" that existed in the circle of that hula hoop.   She was actually encouraging me to get close to nature and practice my observation skills.   Even as an adult, I can vividly remember that the grass wasn't totally green, it was actually made up of yellows and browns and that the grass grew in different directions and each blade had a different texture and the dirt itself was varied in substance.   I noticed that the earth in my hula hoop was active, it moved, it contained insects that were very busy.           

One parent talked about the wind chimes that moved in the branches of a tree in his back yard and another talked about an adoptive squirrel that he thought belonged exclusively to his backyard.  

Memories of freedom outdoors

Many parents shared deep, personal memories of freedom. The freedom to jump in a puddle and create a ripple, freedom to run across open lawn, freedom to create a hideaway under a bush, freedom to twirl around and fall down, freedom to kick a ball, jump over a rope, walk balancing on garden ledge or jump from stone to stone, the freedom to test limits, challenge themselves and a feeling of happiness and accomplishment of just being outside.   And many, many parents shared that, as young children, they practically lived in the outdoor space of their backyards, their neighbor's yards and in the neighborhood parks.

When we incorporated our list of personal and developmental experiences, we all discovered many overlapping memories and play themes that included risk-taking, feeling powerful, constructing, moving, digging and unstructured time inventing games, rules, clubs that included membership, friends and fair play.   We remembered different sounds, textures, smells, the way the sky looked in different seasons, the joy of having a bucket of water and mixing everything we could in it. We loved the experimentation and the mess of being outdoors.

"Academic" learning outdoors

One of our biggest revelations and affirmations was that we needed to allow our children to spend as much time outdoors as possible and to dispel the belief that being indoors offers more opportunity for "academic" learning.  

With the academic hopes and standards that most adults feel children should have to prepare them for the next step in education, the thinking is that children can and do learn more inside.   By going through the exercise of recalling our own childhood memories, we all came to the conclusion that this just isn't so.   We incorporated spaces to have storytime in our new outdoor space, as well as places for block play, small and large manipulative play, areas for art, snack, music and everything that we knew worked well inside with young children indoors.   We decided that it really didn't make sense to separate outdoor time from indoor time or to treat one as learning time and one as play time.   After all, we build our indoor curriculum around playful interaction, the children's interests, and compliment this with equipment and materials.   We can do this in an outdoor environment just as readily and, perhaps even better, because we expose children to a richer world in freedom of movement and natural discovery.

Our outdoor learning environment        

Last summer it was fascinating to watch as the new outdoor space, incorporating all of our ideas, dreams and personal memories, took shape into what is now our children's outdoor learning environment. The daunting task of its creation was interesting, challenging at times and definitely rewarding.   This new outdoor space has become more than a beautiful outdoor learning space because it represents a vision based on sound developmental theory and experiences, as well as a collection of early childhood memories which we, as parents and teachers, all felt passionately about preserving for our children.  

Whether you enjoyed swinging, digging, riding your bicycle, or resting on a bench as a young child, I hope that you will spend more time outdoors with your children and revisit your childhood experience of play and all that you can learn from it.