Heidi's House Playground Redesign
Here at Heidi's House we value our outside spaces as an important part of our educational environment. Children accross the country are spending less and less time outside. It's easy to understand why, when parents are working more, and have more safety concerns with their children playing outside than the previous generation. This makes their time outside here more important than ever. Families here already know the emphasis we put on our playground time and we want to enhance those hours spent there with our latest redesign.
Last year three of us went to a Nature Explore workshop at Tufts University in Boston where we learned about designing a nature based outdoor classroom and about bringing nature into our inside classrooms. This really encouraged us to incorporate more natural elements into our playgrounds. We have been dreaming and planning since then and now that spring is upon us we are ready to start building.
Research shows regular time in nature...
Facilitates better social and physical development
Improves fitness, motor-skills and well-being
Supports creativity and imaginative play
Inspires collaboration and reduces violence and bullying
Reduces stressHere at Heidi's House we value our outside spaces as an important part of our educational environment. Children accross the country are spending less and less time outside. It's easy to understand why, when parents are working more, and have more safety concerns with their children playing outside than the previous generation. This makes their time outside here more important than ever. Families here already know the emphasis we put on our playground time and we want to enhance those hours spent there with our latest redesign.
As this is quite a large project, we will be breaking it up into phases. Each of our playgrounds will be addressed with different phases. Phase 1 will primarily be preparing our new larger garden to get plants in the ground, as well as our Block area, Picnic area and Music area on our big preschool playground. We will try to create as little disruption to play as possible. Fortunately we have 3 separate playgrounds to take turns on. We will do this at the start of May and are hoping to get lots of people to volunteer for a weekend work day to help do it quickly. We will also be working on it during the week, so if that works with your schedule we would love help then too.