|
adventure playground management, connecting playwork practice with
literature, theory and science
“Play is freely chosen, personally directed,
intrinsically motivated behaviour
that actively engages the child”. (Bob Hughes and Frank King.)
"It comes
down to this: I am not a leader, but a servant to the children." (Jack Lambert)
 What Are You Eating?
The yellow cardboard
box measures about 3x6x2 inches. It’s packed full of what the kids call gotta-get-some-food.
It contains 3 pieces of double-deep-fried battered
chicken, a generous helping of chips and a big dollop of mayo and ketchup. It goes down easy and fills you up.
There are dozens
of providers of chicken-and-chips and the like within a mile of the playground. At last count there were 42 fast food outlets
for every school in the borough. What worries us even more than the unhealthy fats in this regular food choice is the
lack of nourishment such meals provide. Recent research by Dr. Terry Wahls on the requirements of our bodies at the mitochondrial
level gives a clear picture of what should be in that yellow box: vegetables. Every day. Three cups each, in fact, of leafy
green, brightly coloured and cruciferous vegetables. That’s what our cells need for health. By the time the kids reach the playground,
we’re cooking a big pot on the fire, and it’s filled with vegetable stew. Kids chop onions, garlic and squash.
Others build up the fire and stir the pot. Most of them will find some room inside them besides what they just wolfed down
from the yellow boxes. They know the food is here, it’s hot and it’s tasty. With some luck steaming soup and stew,
made with fresh veg, spices and enthusiasm, will become a ‘comfort food’—comforting both to mitochondria
and to the spirit.  Terry Wahls, M.D. researched nutrition to conquer her severe MS. She shares findings and recipes in Minding My Mitochondria,
TZ Press, 2010. Her TED talk is well worth watching: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs7jqqdv5eg
 'Allow it'
One of our group asked the other, ‘What is it the kids say to each other
when they want to be heard?’ The other to the one answered,
‘Nose to nose, they shout “Allow it!”’
Aren’t these words of transformation? Of wishes granted? A
phrase that means impossible things can happen—are allowed to happen at Glamis Adventure.
Like that Saturday not long ago when A
young teen—the one who likes to leap from low buildings— Stood pink-eared with pleasure,
saying ‘All the years I’ve been Coming to the playground, I
never thought I’d see her…’ Dame Helen Mirren
Beautiful and well-informed, Strolling round the playground, filming
Close-up and middle distance—Allow it? She did. She
asked, ‘What’s your name? Show me what you’re cooking? Shall
we go on the swings?” She said, “All children should
have a place like this.” She was shining and photogenic and so absolutely right.
Thank you Helen for the visit and for permitting the footage— The kids
called her Helen—she allowed it. The first cut of the short documentary,
directed, edited and filmed by children and young people, is titled 'Now Playing-- Dame Helen Mirren, at Glamis Adventure
Playground'. Its first showing will be at the East London Play Conference, November 9 2012.  The Days of the Junkyard Playground: Postwar Britain
Anybody interested in Adventure Playgrounds has heard of the
junkyard playgrounds colonized by kids in UK when the bombing stopped. Of course, they
were not allowed to play there. And of course, they did. The bomb sites are no longer
there—and increasingly, playgrounds are parti-coloured, planned by adults out of catalogues. But to see what the places
were like at the time, have a look at Hue and Cry, an Ealing Studios film from 1947. The
East End kids in this story—inspired by Emil and the Detectives, but UK through and through in feel—have
the run of London. Like the children and teens in C. Day Lewis’s 1948 adventure novel The Otterbury Incident
(see our page on play in Children’s Literature) none of these characters much remembers a time outside of wartime.
If you drag the button to 15:08 minutes, what you’ll see is an 8-year old boy sitting in rubble,
reliving the sounds of the bombs as they fell. Then you’ll travel into the bombsite, where kids gather in the basements
and broken stairways of bombed out houses.
If you’ve got time to watch the whole 118 minutes,
fantastic. If not, it’s worth checking out the showdown between the kids and the crooks at the end—swarms of them,
alerted by code and by signal, to storm the Shadwell docks. Fab! 
http://youtube/oM42mqDJiKI
Hue
and Cry Quote.... Alastair Sim: Oh, how I loathe adventurous-minded boys. Note (because Mark loves classic cars): Nowadays, films set
in this period are full of period cars. But take a look at the streets in Hue and Cry—they were fairly empty
in ‘47. However, we must point out the Jowett Javelin at minute 55…
 Zen and the Art of Bicycle Building
Four boys turned up at the playground, wanting to build a bike—any
bike. One of them had brought in a mountain bike frame with the idea of finding some bits to fit in our supply.
We searched through our parts without success. Still, they were
undaunted—they wanted to build a bike. The
four found a frame of a young child’s bike that took small wheels. After finding several possible fits, they came to
a consensus on two that did not match but would do the job. With some difficulty they managed to fit these rusty wheels.
They were not finished when Dad showed up. The four protested
vehemently, but Dad was having none of it. So they stashed the bike away until tomorrow. What is the draw of all this bike building? Kids like to put things together.
But more than this—they love to finish a project. They get great satisfaction out of work. And they have the added pleasure
of producing something on their own—without adult direction-- that suits their needs. So now they have a bike they’ve made themselves. For kids, by kids.
And once you have a bike, you have access to further freedom.
 "A person filled with gumption doesn't sit about stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his
own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes. That's gumption. If you're going to repair
a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven't got that you might as well
gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won't do you any good."
Robert M. Pirsig: Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: an inquiry into values. William and Morrow Company,
1974.  We Are the Engineers
How it started: two kids wanted to dig. On the run, full of plans, they asked for a shovel. Two more
joined them at the sandpit. By then the idea had grown among them to dig a canal across the sandpit, with at least one lake
in the middle. Before long,
they could see the advantage of drafting labour for the heavy work, so I was set to work. As I shifted, they scooped out the
remains of the channel with shovels, spades, a rake and by hand. By
now six engineers had begun the process of filling the canal with hosepipes and buckets of water humped over from the pump.
Covered with sand, their jeans wet to the knees and trainers soaked, the kids splashed back and forth, in and out until the
canal was half full of water.
Inevitably, the kid holding the hose got
somebody else wet…. So began the sand and water fight, which grew to include a number of reluctant non-combattants.
In the aftermath, the canal was abandoned half-filled as the kids who had dug it drifted away. Within
half an hour two younger boys had colonized it. For them, the channel meant a glorious twenty minutes up to their ankles,
sloshing around in water and wet sand. (‘Got any spare trainers, Mark?’) Without this sort of kid-initiated fun, where will we get our coming generations of engineers?
Here's a link to a short (44 second) home video of kids in 1932 digging
canals at the start, and then swinging on trapezes… www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpNfjDD6PM0
Playwork practice, theory,
science and literature connections  Listening January 2012 In Richmond, B.C., the municipality is listening to children’s ideas about play.
We watched slackjawed with admiration as a group of enthusiastic municipal people came to Gilmore
Elementary’s Grade 4/5 classroom and asked them what kinds of structures and opportunities for play they would like to see.
The adults gave the children credit for knowing the area
called Terra Nova, where the intention is to open a natural play area for Richmond children. They’d brought in Richard
Kenny, an expert in the flora and fauna of the area, whose enthusiasm helped to fire that of the children. There was a table
set up with natural materials with which to draw. No heavy quilt of adult expectations muffled discussion: the only expectation
was that the children would participate. And they did. Their features animated with
pleasure in their invention, these 9- and 10-year-olds chatted and modeled in clay and straw, twigs and leaves. Some built
models—including ziplines, fire pits and tree houses from which to watch the animals native to the estuary, pond, marsh
and forests of Terra Nova. One boy took twigs and string out of which he constructed the moving, articulated wing of a bird.
With time to present their ideas, they spoke and listened with laughter and enthusiasm. Did they believe that these ideas
would be listened to, and might even come true? Whether they did or not, they will soon find out—because Yvonne Stich,
Park Planner, has asked for the play area to be opened by September. Hapa Collaborative, a Vancouver team of architects and
planners owned and led by Joe Fry, have agreed to do so. Here in the UK, play provision
is being cut, play spaces are being deleted from borough budgets and added to the burden of over-extended charities who search
for what meager funding opportunities are left in a time when children’s welfare is often undervalued and almost always
underfunded. But in Richmond, they’re giving a natural space to the children where they can
play. And they’re encouraging the children have a say in it. Admirable. Fantastic. What is play? In the words of Sean Aldcroft’s students, play is Happiness Outside Excitement Falling down Freedom Skipping Fun Wolves Exercise Enjoy Sports Cheerful Awesomeness Soccer Friends Adventure
 The Gardening Bug Jan 2012 We
talked to the kids at the playground about growing food in raised boxes. They surveyed with pleasure the allotment area abutting
the playground. “Wouldn’t it be great to have smelly things!” (We hoped she meant
herbs.) “It’s great to be able to pick fruits off bushes.” (He’d been
picking blackberries out of the thorns).
“I want to grow things like potatoes and carrots and
cook them over the fire.”
The playground has acquired a few raised beds alongside
the allotments. We hope our new connection with the allotments and their gardeners will allow the kids to be part of the community
of gardening enthusiasts.
I’m looking forward to seeing our kids wrist-deep in
soil, planning a year-round garden, with seasonal foods to prepare and cook on the open fire. We hope kids will come closer
to the natural environment—what little can still be found among the housing blocks that dominate Shadwell.
The kids are going us one better, though. They want to see a wild area, like the one the playground
used to have before a block of flats was built on that spot. It was called “the forest”, and they want another
one, with branches above and dirt underneath. They want to be able to enter a space where the sun turns the light green. When
it rains, you can sit under a bush and hear the pattering sound it makes on the leaves.
 “Got dirt? A study conducted by Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks at the
Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, has found that a bacterium given to mice helped them navigate a maze twice as fast.The bacterium
in question is Mycobacterium vaccae, a natural soil bacterium commonly ingested or inhaled when people spend time in nature.
The effect wore off in a few days, but, Matthews said, the research suggests that M. vaccae may play a role in learning in
mammals. She speculated that creating outdoor learning environments where M. vaccae is present may ‘improve the ability
to learn new tasks’. Smart pill, meet smart bug.”
Richard Louv, The nature principle: human restoration and the end of Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin
Books of Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2011. P. 31  Our Object All Sublime The boy’s mother had arrived at the frayed end of a short rope.
I
asked if Larry would be coming in today, and she said, “No. He’s been bad at school. He’s been bad at home.
He has to be punished.”
This boy’s problem, or rather part of it, is that he has a lot of energy, much
of it misdirected into ferocious temper tantrums, weeping and sometimes violent behavior. He’s eight.
Part
of the reaction stems from an incident last week at the playground when he lost his temper with his parent, who asked him
without warning to stop playing and come home. It was such a violent outburst that they left again without him. Between that
and misbehavior at school, he was to be banned from the playground.
His behaviour merited consequences. Still,
it seems that often at home and at school, challenging children are punished by depriving them of playtime. Parents and teachers,
aware that children love their playtime, want to set consequences that the child will care about. If he wants his playtime
so much, they may reason, he’ll behave.
It sounds logical, but it’s counterproductive. Setting aside
the fact that a child in a spin can’t picture consequences, there’s the problem that without a natural outlet—play—energies
become even more unmanageable, and the child grows more bitter, angry and resentful of control.
When his mother
allowed him to return to the playground, and the family car arrived to pick him up, we asked for 10 minutes’ wait time
so that Larry might finish his play and head out with his friends. He played happily within the natural rhythm of the play
session and left calmly when time was up.
His mother came in and said, “I’m thinking about not letting
him come to the playground at all.”
I said, “It’s better that he’s here than in a two-bedroom
flat. He can play through issues here, and let off steam. He gets attention from his friends and the staff without any baggage
or judgment. Each day’s a clean start here.”
Everybody needs friends, elbow room and warmth. Control
at home, control at school—everybody needs a break.
“I certainly do,” his mother said.
“Leave him at the playground,” I said, as he
played ball
chattered sense and nonsense
poked
at the fire
raced snails
hugged a friend
laughed uproariously
ran and ran and ran "Play Deprivation is the name given to the idea that not
playing may deprive children of experiences that are essential to their development and result in those affected being both
biologically and socially disabled."
 Keeping the Focus
October 10 It’s about not losing the focus of what adventure playgrounds are meant to bring
to children’s lives.
Each adventure playground brings a different interpretation of the spaces that children
once carved out and colonized for themselves—out of bomb sites, vacant lots and whatever wild spaces were within their
reach.
Don’t let’s get sidetracked from this vision—especially with the pressures of funding,
which can lead us to commit to projects that are not true to the philosophy of the adventure playground and rich free play.
We have to advocate messy, risky, noisy, freely chosen outdoor play.
Even if there’s money available
for computers, or homework clubs or sports programmes, we have to keep our focus. No one else in the country is providing
urban children with independent free outdoor play but adventure playgrounds.
Fire. Water. Challenging structures..
Constant connection with the outside environment. Child-centred. Child-led. Child-structured if structured at all. Mud. Sand.
Wind.
 Gotta Build October 3
“That was a tough day,” I find myself saying.
Again. Words like fractious, aggressive and cranky fit some of the kids these past weeks. It affects the whole playground,
and I’m looking for the cause.
I’m working with them on bikes every day, but the kids seem increasingly
discontented. Partly, there aren’t enough bikes to go round. Yesterday we had six bikes on the go and about 15 kids,
some doers and some patio chair advisors. Bikes are not enough. They need more challenges in the playground. They need to
focus on exciting projects.
In the early days of adventure playgrounds, activities centred around building projects—big
structures designed in consultation with the kids who’d be using them. Kids helped scrounge materials from around the
borough—from building sites, builders’ yards, and their own homes. This was serious fun, engaging and challenging.
It meant that the playground was always changing, and energies were focused on improving the playground in ways that pleased
and benefitted the kids.
I survey our structures and the problem is clear. Large, challenging structures built
of telephone poles set six feet into the ground can’t be easily changed on a regular basis. Smaller structures won’t
challenge the active climber/scrambler. However, these large structures can be added to, using lighter weight materials.
The kids love building—dens, platforms to serve as stages, swings. But for bigger projects, we need more and
better materials. We have a never-ending supply
of pallettes, which are great for temporary dens, making stages and bike ramps, with the broken bits feeding the daily fire
and cooking our food. But pallettes are not robust and do not survive hard use.
So the answer is to use lightweight
poles and lightweight planks held together with nails, screws and studding—almost like a giant set of Meccano. The larger
structures and their ten-inch diameter poles provide a strong skeleton from which to work. The lightweight “Meccano
set” can be knocked down and redesigned at will.
So what we’re looking for now is a cheap source of
recycled wood.
 “In Lady Allen’s view, the junk playground was a place where children
could experiment, be encouraged to build and create their own space away from the street. The playground would be an environment
that had endless possibilities and could never be considered immutable, unlike those with man-made fixed equipment. In her
view, the adventure playground had three functions: to recreate the kinds of play that adults had enjoyed in their own childhoods,
to answer critics who felt that children’s use of their free time was “empty and purposeless”, and to meet
the needs of children who ‘do not enjoy organised games, playground asphalt and mechanical swings.’”.
Nils Norman, An architecture of play: a survey of London’s adventure playgrounds, Four Corners Books,
2003. P. 18.  Teens on the Playground If you’re not mindful, older
teens can take over a playground. Yet teens need to play, even though they are in the process of outgrowing the playground.
Some of them handle the transition with grace—visiting now and then, volunteering for a little while before
finding other employment. With others it’s a bumpier ride, and one of the last things you want in an adventure playground
is a tree-house full of sixteen-year-olds, smoking and bullying the little ones.
So just how do you deal with
these grownup-sized kids?
With respect, of course—if you shout, you may reap what you sow. And it’s
important to reason with them individually, adult to adult.
The success of your reasoning will depend on the relationship
you’ve built with them all along—the greetings, the good-natured banter, the help with their bikes, the listening
ear…and you must believe it, teens are great fun. These are intense, witty, interesting people with one unsteady foot
in childhood and the other in the adult world.
“You’re going to have to leave, mate.” I speak
calmly and neutrally to the first of the kids, on his own. I know these kids and like all six of them. “People have
asked you not to pick on the little ones, and you’ve chosen to carry on.”
“It’s not my
fault,” he says, aggrieved. They always want one more chance. “It was the others who were doing it.”
“You were all involved, and you’ve all been spoken to. So you have a choice. You can go now, and we’ll
say no more about it. If you want to come in tomorrow, go now.”
They all leave in the end, with some good-humoured
insistence from me, and trying-it-on protestations from them. They’ll zip off to the youth club around the corner for
a game of pool, where they’ll be among the youngest there.
When next we see them, I’ll talk to them
again. They’ll be fine—hanging out around the fire, fixing bikes, building dens, helping with the cooking. You
see, here, they’re the oldest. “If the child is one that you already have a good relationship with, then the chances are that he will accept that moment
of authority quite happily when he sees the reason for it.” -Jack
Lambert and Jenny Pearson, Adventure playgrounds. Penguin, 1974. P. 70  August 11 Cheap as Chips: It’s
a Junk Food City
At least 25% of the kids in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets are classified as obese
by the age of eleven.
Despite the efforts of the council and health authorities one of the main causes is a proliferation
of junk food shops in the borough. The score now stands at 42 of these shops for each and every school. This comes to over
six hundred shops selling fast food in Tower Hamlets.
A typical shop here in East London offers cheap fried and
battered chicken and sausages, burgers, pies and chips, most of it of poor quality and high in fat. To be fair, they offer
kebabs with salad, but I’ve never yet seen a kid eating one of these. Often left to their own devices, a couple of pounds
in their pockets to buy something to eat, kids will always look for the best value for money.
Kids get hungry,
and they love to eat. Often, they won’t have breakfast; then they’ll eat chicken and chips for lunch, and in the
mid-afternoon, and again at night.
A few days ago, one of our boys disappeared from the playground at lunchtime
and came back with a yellow cardboard box in his hands.
“What have you got there?” I asked him.
“Chicken and chips.”
I said, “Give us a chip then.”
When he opened the box, the contents
were smothered in ketchup and mayonnaise.
I said to him, “We’re cooking. Don’t you want some curry
and rice?”
He dug into the yellow box. “No, I don’t like that stuff.”
By four in the afternoon,
he’d come back with another box of chips.
In Tower Hamlets, the ratio of junk food shops to schools is almost
twice the national average. Cheap, battered and fried prepared foods are pictured in the windows of the large grocery stores
in the area.
The Tower Hamlets council has tried to introduce regulations which govern the quality of food within
the license granted to each shop. They want to enforce it, but legislation is stalled.
One chicken and chips shop
made four applications for planning permission and a license to operate. Four times it was denied, the fourth time by a High
Court decision. The shop applied again and was successful. So’s the business, we assume—chips are cheap.  Fire
We have a fire in the playground even when it’s
hot out—a big open fire in a pit dug for the purpose.
Why, when the sun’s grilling the tops of our
heads?
Without fire, the playground seems empty at its centre. We start it up later in the warmer months, in the
afternoon when the peak hours of heat are over. Fire for cooking, for making cups of tea… everyone gathers at the fire
at some point or other. In a way, fire connects a small community like ours, the way it has done through the ages in small
and large gatherings, uniting all ages with its energy and spark. One of a group of Park Rangers, here on a training session,
reminded us that pre- and post-war, East London left the city en masse, hop-picking in the summertime--families in the country
on a working holiday. He said the parents went round the pub, while the kids built a fire and talk and friendships grew around
it.
Kids stay late when the days are long. Their play alters with the weather and the seasons, but fire is always
at the heart of the playground.  "...in my childhood fires were things one sat by in solitude, feeding the
flames, staring into the embers and wathing the smoke drift; they were a focus to dance around and sing by--ritual places
which facilitated rites, conversations and reflections; they were feeding places where beans were heated, spuds baked and
chippatis cooked; they were places where everyone had a job--to fan the flames, feed the flames or get some water. Fires created
communal areas where childhood culture was passed on and they were places to learn of life's dangers and thrills." -Bob Hughes, Evolutionary playwork and reflective analytic practice. Routledge, London
and New York. 2001. p.8  Why Do They Do It…?
A seven-year-old came running
up, saying two of the other boys were peeing in the treehouse.
They wanted me to pee in it,” he told me,
“but I didn’t want to.”
“Good for you,” I said.
The two nine-year-olds
were heading for the playground exit. I stood in the doorway and asked for an explanation.
The first brazened
it out. “It wasn’t me.”
The second turned on him. “It was you,” he protested.
“You showed me how to do it.”
At such moments, it’s important to keep some perspective on matters.
Young boys have always peed on things. I’m not sure whether it’s a doggy sort of rite of passage or a wish to
experiment with physics, but boys pee on things.
I sighed. It had been a year since anyone had peed untowardly.
The last boy had grown since then, and would be mortified to be reminded of it now.
While I kept my perspective,
the nine-year-olds fidgeted, keen to get away.
I did them a deal. Either I’d talk to their mums, or they’d
take a mop each and a bucket of disinfectant. A moment of indecision followed, but the thought of the wrath of their mothers
outweighed the hardship of mopping out the treehouse.
The task was nearly finished when their concentration waned.
It was a good enough job.
Consequences to misdeeds are vital, thus the mop and bucket. The tricky bit was not
coming down on them with my judgment of their actions. They knew it was wrong. They reaped the consequences. But because no
judgment was offered, they’ll be doing their own judging, which is far more effective than the adult bollocking they
expect and ignore.
Well, it’s all part of childhood. With any luck, it’ll be another year before the
next bucket of bleach.
 Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
From Chapter 2... "Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush.
He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board
fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden."
 Macbeth: A Play within a Playground June 2011
In his memoir An Actor’s Life, Gielgud said that during World War II the soldiers were
the best audience of all, because they didn’t know what was going to happen in Hamlet.
The soldiers watched
agog, and that’s how the kids watch Cornucopia’s production of Macbeth, put on for the East London community in
Glamis Adventure Playground. It’s a stunning production that makes exciting use of the playground structures. The designers
have blended leather-and-studs costumes with tech-dressed uniforms, lamé and sequins… it works, and everywhere
details playful and dire catch your eye.
The groups of kids among the mostly adult audience dart from one scene
to the other, a bit like schools of small fish, settling by the basket swing (now the feast table from beneath which rises
Banquo’s ghost) or trailing the Porter as he involves a couple of laughing audience members in his jokes.
Rehearsals have been happening during play sessions at the playground, and several talented kids in their teens have taken
important roles—Malcolm, son of Duncan and the Weird Sisters, for example, do very well among the cast of gifted professionals.
The playground is theirs, some of the actors are theirs… and the play lives. Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, comes to Glamis
Adventure Playground.
From the 24-25 June, 7.30pm
Glamis Adventure Playground, 10 Glamis Road, E1W 3EG,
Tower Hamlets
Website info: Cornucopia Theatre Company’s community Shakespeare project, Macbeth & his Lady,
teams up local 11- to 20-year-olds with professional actors from the company to train, rehearse and perform side by side.
This is an urban, site-specific production that highlights the intersections between local culture – hip-hop, bhangra,
Caribbean and Brazilian carnival and more – and Shakespeare’s classic text.
Free
cornucopiatheatre.co.uk
“Freud said that life is all about being able to love and work. And I think it is about those things. But
it’s also about play. Play can bring back the past, but even if it doesn’t, play is now; play is fun. More than
ever, I have the feeling that all of what we do that counts is just love and work and play.
And for me, because it makes
the other two even better, the best of these is play.”
-Alan Alda, Never have your dog stuffed and
other things I’ve learned. Random House, New York. 2006
 Water World May 2011
It’s
good to see kids getting out to the playground and playing in water. Kids whose parents have been telling them not to get
wet, that they’ll “catch cold”, are now sending them to play with an extra set of clothing.
Sometimes
the kids are occupied for hours, digging lakes or constructing sand castles, tunnels and strange and wonderful structures.
Or maybe they’ll be taking it in turns to soak each other and shriek and run, splashing incidental parents
sitting nearby. After all, it’s the kids’ playground and adults must take it as it comes, we remind them, wringing
out our own shirtfronts.
Kids will play with water until they’re shivering. They’ll splash it on sand
structures to see how they melt, will toss it in great sheets across the pathways and make the grass glitter, will pour it
down the slides. They’ll fill up water balloons and attack everything and everyone in sight until the game overlaps
the edge of chaos and becomes actually chaotic* and a playworker steps in to bring it back to a level where all the children
are again enjoying their play.
*from the Scottish Play Commission, 2007:
"…Arthur Battram
began with the premise that as play is a function of all primates, it is innately essential to human beings. He presented
the model that an effective play environment is an environment which operates on the edge of chaos. Arthur illustrated how
the complexity of play is a transient, dynamic phenomenon, poised between order and chaos, and that the duty of Playworkers
was to support rather than manage. He highlighted that play is not about childcare or education, and urged delegates to challenge
the "Elfansafety" culture; to focus on the benefits of play; and to change the focus from problems to solutions.
Play is serious, as it is through play we become humans…."
Link: www.playscotland.org/scottish-play-commission
 Outdoors for a Week
April 2011 Sunshine Coast, B.C.
It occurs to me that a lot of the eleven-year-olds
who come on Outdoor Ed with our school haven’t had much of a chance to play in the rain.
But as rain looms,
we’re a small group entering the temperate rainforest through an arched natural doorway into a cathedral-like space.
Here it’s quiet but lush with hemlock, cedar, huckleberries, salal, skunk cabbage with its brilliant decorator blossom,
sword and deer ferns… and not much else. These are the trees and bushes that are happiest here in Egmont under the
sun-filtering canopy of the conifers, and naming them feels powerful.
It’s a privilege to watch kids in
the wilderness. This is my second group of nine, and I’ve just told them, go play in the woods. They had a
little solo time out of sight of the world, and noticed the sounds birds make. Now they’re finding huge logs to climb
on where they perch, calling like birds.
The last group were chatting and didn’t seem to hear the birds,
but they pushed deep into the woods on their own and found they could orient themselves with the camp once they’d passed
out of view. They’re so used to being watched that most had been unaware of their ability to find their way back in
an unfamiliar place.
These kids live in flat delta at the mouth of the Fraser River. They love the challenging
ups and downs, the mossy boulders and boggy hollows of the forest. They stamp their feet against the soft echoing soil made
of rotted plant life rather than the black loam back home. It’s pouring rain here in the rainforest, but you hardly
notice it under the canopy. Anyway, rain’s just water falling from the sky. Why does snow get all the love?
Now two of the bird-calling girls disappear over a big hill into the farther trees, and I begin to wonder where they’ve
gone. The littlest among the boys breaks from his friends and runs among the trees and ferns up over the bluff. I stop myself
from calling to him.
The conversationalists in the trees
have forgotten I'm around and are singing developmentally necessary kids' songs about poo, playing a jellybean word game they
appear to have made up on the spot and bouncing each other on the logs. The two girls return from the deeps and I see that
the littlest boy has rejoined the people tree.
The third group I bring in wants to climb up high on things and
balance. These kids look for the longest, most difficult logs to balance on, except for the boy with anger issues who deconstructs
a rotten stump. As he stabs at its side with a stick, the red sawdust he makes looks just like the sawdust the insects produce
when they bore their holes.
“Kids never get any freedom” a tall boy in my fourth group says as I send
them out to solo. There’s a well-kitted out boy from a German family who spends half his life canoeing and hiking, and
I see him leaping down the cliffside like a small plaid deer. The sun’s come out for this group. warming the moss and
striking white lights from the low salal. All the kids have disappeared into the forest. Again, with 15 minutes to go, I stop
myself from calling about to them by holding my hand over my mouth. I’ve just been telling them how in my youth I’d
spend the day alone in the woods with a paint box and a sandwich.
I sit on damp red sawdust with my back against
a nurse stump as the sunlight finds its way down to me, while the kids’ shouts ring out among the birdcalls.
 "I am on my mountain in a tree home that people have passed without ever
knowing that I am here. The house is a hemlock tree six feet in diameter, and must be as old as the mountain itself. I came
upon it last summer and dug and burned it out until I made a snug cave in the tree that I now call home.”
-Jean Craighead George, My side of the mountain. Puffin Modern Classics, New York. 1959.  Kids in Cottonwool March
What we hear: Watch your children every second; cushion them with rubberized
play surfaces—not grass! not sand! because there could be cat poo and it could kill them; equip them with cell phone
locators in case they’re snatched; don’t let them take the bus, any stranger, including and especially that old
gentleman, is a possible predator. If you’re good parents, and you have the resources, then thank your happy fortune
that you can keep your kids sealed up under your eye inside a thoroughly-equipped, technologically appealing house. Spend
your money and watch them, watch them… or they will die alone and it will be your fault. The sales appeal.
It could sell us sniffer bottles of clean air if it could make us think our children would be better for having them.
Of course, the greatest of sales appeals result in all of us parents as crusading reformers, spreading the word.
So, it’s no wonder we parents tend to see ourselves as the last line of defense between our children and herds
of human and non-human predators, all of them poised to spring on the front steps. Our fear grows from necessarily protective
parental instinct but is fueled to an unnatural level by, on one hand, storytelling in the media (and when you write a story,
you think how can I make this story matter deeply? Some writers answer, emperil the kid.) and on the other
hand, varied and enterprising money-makers in the business of childhood products and services, dealing out fear to haul in
profits.
We’ve been sold the line that our primary duty must be to keep children healthy and safe from injury.
It is not—that’s our primary duty with babies and toddlers. Our duty and our joy is to raise our children by encouraging
gradually increasing independence, so that they can keep themselves safe and healthy while delighting in the wonder and thrilling
challenges that the world affords. That’s confidence. That’s happiness. I believe neither of those is for sale.
Nature provides the “cottonwool-ing” a child needs at first, within the parent’s natural instincts
and in the infant itself. Literally within, to start—the foetus cushioned in fluid inside the mother’s body. Next,
the child spends a lot of time against the mother’s body, warm and fed—secure and loved. As the child reaches
toddlerhood, it’s as if he or she were on an invisible string—running away from the parent and right back, running
away a little further…and right back. Independent life begins.
Or, suffocation of their natural independence.
"I believe that society is currently making grave errors about where
its young should be in its list of priorities and thinking. Rather than being seen increasingly as recipients of services
and being smothered by adults’ neuroses, children need instead to experience the elements, know the freedom to range,
have insights into the lives of other species and take lots of risks. That is a parental as well as a governmental responsibility.
It is a species issue for all of us to consider." -Bob Hughes, Evolutionary playwork and reflective analytic practice. Routledge, London
and New York. 2001. p.145  Goodnight, Sweet Rat February We heard shrieking outside the open playground gates—girls screaming, the delighted
edge to the noise unmistakable.
They rushed into the playground
with the news that they’d found a dead grey rat in the roadway. They tore back out again to investigate further, prodding
it with shoes and sticks.
One of the older girls recovered
it, bringing it into the playground on the end of a long forked stick. Playground staff saw it coming and weren’t too
happy. However, after some discussion, the rat was brought in for a proper burial.
The fire was going, and that inspired the first idea: “Let’s cremate it.”
But one of the Bengali boys said, “Let’s bury it with kindness.”
The group decided they would bury it. But one of the girls said, “We need
to give it a name.”
“Let’s call it Bob,”
piped a second girl.
A third child added, “But we
need to say a few words before we cover it in soil.”
She whipped out a bible she happened to have in her school bag and read a passage. One of our autistic boys put his hands
together. So there the ceremony was, with a mixture of all faiths, and no faith, involved.
The formalities complete, the children covered Bob over in soil and the stick that brought
him into the playground was used as a marker for his burial place.
You’ll have perceived the progression of steps from squeamishness, to curiosity, to pity, to respect that the children
passed through, unaided. Dealing with death is something children need to come to terms with but don’t often get the
opportunity in such a direct way nowadays. The ceremony gave them the opportunity to discuss death amongst themselves and
adults. That’s a pretty important experience in a culture where children regularly see fictionalized, surrealized and
sanitized death in the media (or animal death in a plastic wrapper on the supermarket shelf).
Later the following week a school party came in. One of the smaller girls approached the head
teacher. “We have a dead rat. Would you like to see it?”
It was decided that Bob would prefer to rest undisturbed.
 “Life is morally messy.” Richard Louv, from the 2007 documentary film
“Where Do The Children Play?” For more information on this video, go to www.allianceforchildhood.org.uk  In children’s literature, a child deals with the death of his cat in Judith
Viorst’s wonderful story The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. Illustrated by Erik Blegvad.
Simon & Schuster, 1971.  The Return of the Kid January 2011 Heard near the playground…
“Why haven’t you been in?”
“My dad says he doesn’t want me out when nights
are dark early.”
“Tell your dad then nights are shorter now…”
During the freezing
weather of December and early January, the number of kids at the playground reduced to a hardy band of about twenty regulars
along with a few fair weather friends. Nearing the end of January now, with lighter nights and less drastic temperatures,
there’s been an influx of kids who haven’t been in for nearly two months.
We’ve seen a revival
of construction activities—and plenty of deconstruction. With any new year, there’s a healthy movement for change.
We see chasing games and banterish arguments we’ve missed through deepest winter.
Children, it seems, have
been mostly kept indoors, no doubt due to parents’ fears of harm due to dark and cold. (See the NPR article, below,
as a pediatrician discusses “Why Kids Hate to Wear Coats”)
They throw their coats wherever they are
when they feel the burden and constriction. The coats blow like banners from fenceposts, towers and swings.
A pediatrician reassures @ NPR: Why Kids Hate to Wear Coats
You'll
find a new entry Jan 22 on our Children's Lit page. Articles:
 Fireside Comfort January 2011
Tomato soup, pumpkin soup. Daal and chickpea curry. Bean stew, pots of tea…
As January drizzles on, fire continues to be the heart of the adventure playground. Time and again, kids come and
go from the smoking, sparking centre of all the action. One kid sits and cuts onions while a littler one pokes the fire and
makes it jump. Another pours tea and passes a mug to his pal, the two sitting elbows on knees, their hands wrapped around
the hot brew, staring into the fire.
When soup’s on, everyone turns up—not in a fuss, because there’s
enough for all, but not too slowly either, because (to the surprise of one or two of the more conservative eaters) it’s
good.
It’s not just good, it’s comfort. Not the swift numbing pleasure of sugar and starch, but the
enduring comfort of intelligently spiced, hearty fare. A homey comfort, away from home.
Given a choice, at the
end of a difficult day, with rain-soaked shoulders and a wearied brow, will you reach for sweets, crisps or soup? I suppose
it all depends on what you learn to love as a child. “Eat food.
Not too much. Mostly plants.” - Michael Pollan  The Attention-Seeking Kid November 2010 He snatches up a pot of paint and sprays it everywhere.
She nicks a bag
of marbles or someone else’s phone from the office and dashes away.
He climbs on the roof and won’t
get down.
Of course, you recognize the play cues. And what do you do with the child that is consistently seeking
attention, through anti-social behaviour? Does a facility like an adventure playground have the capacity to deal with children
like this? Because there are many.
Ideally, the environment will be stimulating enough for him or her to find
something to do—bicycle repair, den building, go-cart building. The playground needs to change and develop in ways that
are exciting to the child. But it may also be the reality that this child needs one-to-one contact with a sympathetic, friendly
adult.
The adult needs to set aside some time to pick up on the child's play cues before they get anti-social
or extreme, but without allowing the child to control and monopolize the adult’s time, because other children will become
discontented and jealous. Finding a balance is important, because we can’t lose sight of this fact: we’re trying
to create an environment where the adult is only a facilitator for the most part, so that the children have a chance to play
as if there were no adults around.
“Certainly when a child asks for help we should respond, but we should
be aware that the more help we give the more the experience is adulterated and the more the children may become dependent
on the help that would not—in adult-free circumstances—have normally been available.” Bob Hughes, Evolutionary playwork and reflective analytic practice. Routledge, London
and New York. 2001 p.98  Delight October 2010 When a parent offered to bring bags of sweets to the playground for Hallowe’en,
it got me thinking about how we love to make children’s eyes light up.
It seems to me that one of the great
things about being a parent is the joy we feel watching children’s faces bloom with wonder.
The easiest
way is to bring them a creatively iced cupcake. Well, it has not escaped us that children love sweets, and they love presents.
Their eyes light up when they receive them, so that makes us happy. Then as our kids grow older, they can search for that
elusive feeling of wonder as they buy themselves sweets and return home at night with a crisp bag of new clothes or the latest
phone.
So what about Hallowe’en, I ask myself? When I was little, you made your own costume (or belabored
your mom to sew one to match your dreams), you ran out into the night with friends your own age—without adult supervision.
You rang strangers’ doorbells and they gave you candy or—now, this was a horrible thrill of unimaginable proportions—you
had to come up with a trick before they did. Stirring, scary, fun.
Of all this, what is left? Candy. I mean, sweets.
A plastic bag costume your mom got on sale the year before. Fireworks…
Fireworks. There you
go. Nothing to take home, nothing sweet, but oh! The glory. And the show is short-lived, so you long for it again. You can
hold a little one on your shoulder and exchange wows with the bigger ones. As well, here in the UK, Guy Fawkes Day is really
more like it: a bonfire! There’s a stirring sight, hot with danger and excitement.
Take them to see the fireworks.
And for god’s sake, give those kids sparklers and let them write their names in the dark.
"You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy." ~Eric Hoffer
 Is My Child Making Friends? October 20
He was a completely different child when his friend walked
in.
His face lit up, and his whole body seemed to relax.
For most of that session at the playground, the temper and anger that are usually there had disappeared, even when the two
boys weren’t actually playing together.
It’s hard for kids to find friends these days. Time outside
school hours is often consumed by organized sport and other endeavours, like shopping with a parent--it’s hard to find
friends when you’re following a shopping trolley through the aisles at Tesco. Even when you are among other children
in organized activities such as football or ballet, most of your moments are adult-coached or adult-directed, and the only
child-to-child time tends to be in the dressing rooms, being hurried along, or on the edge of the field awaiting the next
change of player. At school, friendships must fit into a narrow break time. Friendships at home—“play dates”—are
often arranged among parents, rather than by the children themselves.
At the playground, children mix with a wide range of peers, with absolute freedom of choice as to
who is their friend. They have a chance—they have hours—to make friends with kids they might never have
spent time with, individually and in groups. They gain the all-important experience of playing with and around kids they don’t
actually like. Long-term friendships grow; short-term friendships between children who may never meet again bloom and vanish
into happy memory. Outside the home, there is nothing more important to children than their friendships, and the more opportunities
they have to learn how to make friends, the happier they will be as they grow up and move on through life.  "Children have a right to make their own friends. As a playworker you
will be working to create a firendly atmosphere in which children, and young people, can get to know one another. However,
they will make the choice over whom they wish to be their more regular companions. You will make an exception to leaving choices
entirely up to children if one or more of the users of your play setting are being ignored or deliberately excluded, apparently
because of their race or gender, or because of a disability." Paul Bonel & Jenny Lindon. Good Practice in Playwork, 1996. Stanley Thornes (Publishers) Ltd. (p. 43).
 September 25, 2010 What Have You Got? Part 2
By the campfire, stirring the pot of bean stew: “What’s that, then? I’m not
eating that.”
“Do you know what it is? Why don’t you try it?”
“…Hmmm. That’s
all right… I’ll have a little more, then.”
And he came back for three more lots.
Where
do we go now after we’ve spent the summer outside (it’s been rather a damp one)? We’re now moving into our
season of mists and mellow fruitfulness—and it’s coming up dark, cold and wet. We’ve experimented all summer
with cooking different sorts of food outdoors, from vegetable stews to whole meal pancakes with cheese, to all manner of beans
and pulses and whole meal dough twisted around a stick and toasted over the open fire.
What we haven’t experimented
with is producing basic bread, mainly because we’ve nowhere to cook it. Now is probably the time to get our hands dirty
experimenting with constructing a clay oven and producing some whole meal bread in loaves. Having recently read Kiko Denzer’s
book Build Your Own Earth Oven, and having recently acquired two and a half tons of soil and a pile of sand, we’re
in good shape to start building some small experimental earth ovens, working up to building a full-sized oven, which we can
use as part of our outdoor cooking programme.
The procedure’s fairly straightforward and has been practiced
for many thousands of years, using many of the same material as for Cobb housing. Simply put, you build a form with wet sand
or such, slap a mixture of clay, sand and straw around the form, allow the clay to dry a little. Excavate the sand form through
the doorway cut in the front and set a fire inside to cure the structure.
The theory is that this type of oven
produces convective, radiant and conductive heat, and should produce some of the finest whole meal loaves in East London…after
a certain amount of happy trial and error, producing, possibly, some of the finest doorstops in East London.
 "Radiant heat is fundamental to our very existence--from it we have
sun and seasons, photosynthesis and weather, food and shelter, and of course, wheat and bread. The architect Christopher Alexander
says that humans have a biological preference for radiant heat--his answer to why people prefer an open fireplace to an open
heating vent. Perhaps that's another reason why bread is better baked in a wood-fired oven..." Denzer, Kiko, & Hannah Field, Build Your Own Earth Oven: A Low-Cost, Wood-Fired, Mud Oven. 3d edition, 2006.
Hand Print Press. (p. 9).
 September 6, 2010 What Have You Got? Part 1
At least he brought a banana.
I peered into the blue carrier bag the eight-year-old had brought with him. Lunch.
In toto: two Shoobs (gel in a tube), a Fruit Shoot (sugar drink), a packet of chocolate fingers and a chocolate latte
cake.
And the banana. Thank God for that.
How’s that lunch for you-are-what-you-eat? And we
wonder why some kids seem on a permanent high. But the immediate problems of this sort of diet are the least of it—it’s
the long-term health issues., like the unprecedented levels of Type 2 Diabetes in children, usually found only in adults,
high levels of obesity and all the physical and emotional damage that causes.
In their lunches we notice colas, flavoured sugar drinks and energy drinks like Red Bull. Rare is the bottle
of unflavoured, pure water. We see sandwiches of chocolate spread on white bread, and we see infinite varieties of crisps.
Or no lunch at all, and three pounds to spend—on
what? Guess…
It’s easy to understand. We hear
the reasoning from friends, from co-workers, from the children’s parents, and out of our own mouths as well: "If
they don’t like it, they won’t eat it. And they’ve got to eat something."
Kids will eat when they’re hungry. What they eat… I had another peek into
the blue carrier bag as the kids ran off at the end of the day. The eight-year-old had played hard in the open air and had
clearly raised a fine appetite for lunch. Gone were the Shoobs, gone the Fruit Shoots, the chocky fingers, the cake. But there
was something in the bulge at the bottom of the bag. Something…
“Hey,” I called after him. “Hey, wait—you forgot your banana.”
Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, writes: “It’s not an
exaggeration to talk about contemporary children being addicted to junk. Psychologist Deanne Jade, founder of the National
Centre for Eating Disorders, explains that highly flavoured food works in the same way as drugs. ‘It changes our mood
and it impacts on the chemicals and neurotransmitters in the brain in a similar way to alcohol, nicotine and cocaine.’
The extent of physical addiction is considerably less, of course, but as the British nutritionist Dr Susan Jebb puts it, ‘Children
develop very strong learned preferences—junk food can become a psychological addiction.’
 Sue Palmer. Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children
and What We Can Do About It. Orion, 1006 (p.23)  August 25 Health, Happiness and Welfare
How much do
we as a nation value our children? It would seem, based on statistics over the last few years, that we don’t value them
very highly, with the UK coming near the bottom in terms of children’s health, happiness and welfare. (they all have
cell phones, though).
How is it that countries like the Netherlands regularly feature at the top of these lists?
What is it that they’re doing differently?
One of the answers is, they’re investing in their children.
If you look at the UNESCO and OECD reports on per capita spending on children, they come out consistently higher than UK governments
expenditures. When the crunch comes, we safeguard our banks, but not our children.
It’s important to note
that many countries—like the Netherlands, Denmark, Fermany and Sweden—invest heavily in play provision for children, and it’s become a way of thinking
when they build new towns and housing developments. In the UK, play provisions are often an afterthought. There, it’s
built into the legislation. Here, it’s often an afterthought. "Joy is our birthright, and is intrinsic to our essential design.
For highly competitive, serious people to realize that they have missed this joy canbe devastating. Perhaps this fact lies
behind the culturaly supported idea that people who play are superficial, are not living in the real world, are dilletantes
or amoral slackers." -Stuart Brown. Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates
the Soul. Avery, New York, 2009. Page 147.  July 23 Playday
Isn’t every day “Playday”?
“Playday” is a celebration of the
right of the child to play (see the UN Rights of the Child page, above). Like all celebrations, it blends fun and profile-raising,
particularly raising awareness of the importance of play in children’s lives. Adults are encouraged to come inside play
provision spaces—adventure playgrounds—to see what goes on.
I’ve arranged Playdays that saw
1 500 children and as many adults attend, with stacks of cardboard for den-building, unicycles and stilts, storytellers and
a mobile farm. The advocacy was far-reaching, although the danger with arranging an “event” such as this is that
it can become highly organized, with activities arranged by adults. In the end it can resemble a huge birthday party or after-school
club, and then where’s your advocacy for rich free play?
What we should be aiming for is a normal play provision,
well advertised, where children are free to choose what they do. Maybe the ideal would be a feast of loose parts with playworkers
present to facilitate. Adults can come and see how their children will take old boxes, sand and water or loose parts and play
freely. There’s an opportunity to talk with people who understand play and can explain the benefits of freely chosen
play.
On such a Playday, adults and children can get a good idea of what’s on offer at the adventure playground.
People are often used to thinking of colourful, unchallenging catalogue playgrounds or “pocket parks” as play
spaces, and how boring these can be for children, compared with their games cubes. Take the same children to a play space
rich with loose parts and the company of other children, all full of imagination, playful spirits popping away, and watch
what happens—originality of thought, social connections, vigorous movement and voices raised in shouts and laughter. You can Google Playdays, and visit London Play Playdays at www.londonplay.org.uk/document.php?document_id=23
-
 July 15 Summer's Here--Go Out and Play Part 1
“And is it any wonder that the digital generation is the fattest in human history? You don’t need to be a dietician
to work out that sitting on your arse watching reruns of OC or playing Maelstrom does not burn many calories. Britain’s
Institute of Child Health estimates that for every extra hour of TV a five-year-old child watches on the weekend, his risk
of obesity in adulthood rises by 7 percent. Research from the UD suggests that children who watch over two hours of television
a day are more than twice as likely to suffer from hypertension linked to weight gain.”—Under Pressure:
Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting. Carl Honoré. HarperOne, 2008
A number
of years back I read an article about athletes having spent a day copying children move for move for about 12 hours. The athletes
couldn’t keep up.
Children, playing as the spirit takes them, in a space that offers room to move, exercise
and strengthen every bit of their bodies. Adventure playground staff check regularly with the guides to play types to ensure
that all play types can be accessed by the kids as they want and need them. At the same time, their young minds are playing
with the ideas, information and skills that school and other experiences bring them.
Time to go outside and play!
 July 2 Bullying in the Playground
The results of bullying have created some very big headlines in recent years. No one of
us wants to see any child pushed around or abused by his peers to a level where life is intolerable. Physical or emotional bullying is painful and destructive for the victim and for the child doing
the bullying. Some bullied children consider or actually do take their
own lives. There are cases where children have taken their victims’ lives as well.
Zero tolerance for bullying
is the watchword for many schools and playgrounds. But here’s the problem. No matter how much control you exert, bullies
will always exist. How do children deal with bullying when there’s no safety net and adults aren’t present to
protect them?
If children are perfectly protected as they grow up and thus have no experience in dealing with
bullies, what happens when they meet that first bully in the workplace?
How does a child learn to stand up for
himself? And how does he learn to stand up for another person?
At the playground, for example, you might observe
a ten-year-old picking on a seven-year-old. It’s probably more effective if a twelve-year-old peer intervenes in that
set-up, rather than a grownup. The bully will pay more attention to one of his peers, and the victim gets a model of how to
deal with the bully.
It must be closely and carefully monitored, hour by hour and day by day. Like any risk assessment,
you don’t allow it to put the child at serious risk of emotional or physical harm before we intervene.
~ I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating
a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these
words he epitomized the history of the human race. ~ Bertrand Russell
 June 14 Ending a Play Session
Most of us really dislike being
interrupted when we are engrossed in something we like doing. Children are no different.
When children come into
the adventure playground, they choose what they want to do, whether it be alone, with other children or with the playworkers
on site. If adults are invited into the children’s play and become part of the play cycle, they must be aware of signals
from the children as to whether they are still need or should find a way of bowing out.
The same is true when a
play session is nearing its end. As adults we may be weary and are looking forward to the end of the day, and going home.
However, as playworkers we should be intensely aware as to how the children are feeling as the session is wound down.
Just think how it feels to a child, intensely involved in their play, only to have an adult shouting at them, saying that
they have to finish playing ‘now’ and ‘off you go’.
How about spending fifteen or twenty
minutes before the session ends, letting the children know, sensitively, that they should think about winding up, what they
are doing. Then go around say five minutes before closing to say that time is almost up. This gives the children to complete
their play cycle or at least put it in a place that they can pick it up again another time.
What we want to avoid
is the child being jerked out of their play, which almost inevitably leads to aggravation for all.
One recent example
is of an eight year old who was deeply involved with some snails. No one had warned him that his parent was collecting him
early to go somewhere he didn’t want to go. This turned into screaming match, with the child being grounded because
of his behaviour. Had we let this child know what was happening and when, there is a good chance that this whole incident
could have been prevented.
If all of this is done in a gentle and calm way, the chances of the adults getting away
on time are greatly increased, as most children are ready to go.  June 2 Nature in the Playground
In his 2005 book, Last
Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv writes:
“More time
in nature—combined with less television and more stimulating play and educational settings—may go a long way toward
reducing attention deficits in children, and, just as important, increasing their joy in life. Researchers at the Human-Environment
Research Laboratory believe that their findings—if replicated and broadened by additional research—point to nature
therapy as a potential third course of treatment, applied either in concert with medication and/or behavioral therapy, or
on its own. Behavioral therapy and nature therapy, if used collaboratively, might teach the young how to visualize positive
experiences in nature when they need a calming tool.” Richard
Louv, Last Child in the Woods. Algonquin Books, 2005. p. 107
How does this apply to adventure playgrounds? If we look at the early days of adventure playgrounds, they were places where
children could experience many of the joys of nature, but over the years the ethos seems to have changed, moving towards a
more indoor and youth-club orientated format. So how do we bring some of the connections with nature back into today’s
adventure play?
A recent opportunity developed when an old plastic boat full of water was left to stagnate for
some time. In it the children spotted tadpoles, maggots and other insects. In another instance, a kid lost his key in the
nettles. In his frantic, stinging search for the key, he came across a colony of snails. This developed into a week-long project
of snail racing and snail observation by many of the children, out of sheer fascination brought on by close contact with these
creatures.
The children have long been attempting to make a connection with the semi-wild cat that lives under
the building. Many children in this urban setting live in flats where pets are not allowed. Although the cat is wary of people,
the children have learned to accept Knightrider for himself. They’ve built him a shelter and take turns in feeding him.
They greet him as one of their own.
We may not have a pond or a river, or an abundance of open space, but with
careful management of the site, we can develop some opportunities for kids to connect with the natural world.
 May 20 Playground Memories A man dropped by Glamis today, bringing a couple of kids to the playground. He remembers
playing the playground space in the mid-sixties before the first Glamis adventure playground went up in 1967. He said in the
early days it was “a bomb site” and thought the children’s hospital that stood on that spot might have been
bombed in the war.
In the mid-sixties and before, people in the neighbourhood used to use that piece of ground
as a playground, but also on such occasions as Guy Fawkes night, when they had a big neighbourhood bonfire.
He
used the playground when it was set up originally until the early seventies. He and his friends lived in Shadwell Basin, and
used to go swimming in the docks across the road, and then head the playground, stinking of the Thames. (The woman in charge
used to tell them to get out of the building because they stank so badly.)
He left a tenner and said “Thanks
for the memories”.
He’s one of ten or twelve who remember Glamis before it closed in 1992. It closed
and became a wild area full of cats when the GLC was abolished and the funding dried up. It’s drying up now. We’re
working hard on fundraising, trying to find the financial support for the capital moneys and for salaries. Or at least for
cat food.
In the literature:  "Play can become a doorway to a new self, one much more in tune with the
world. Because play is all about trying on new behaviors and thoughts, it frees us from established patterns." -Stuart Brown, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates
the Soul. Avery, New York, 2009. Page 92.
 May 10 Inclusion at the Adventure Playground
I heard
Bob Hughes speaking on Inclusion at his seminar in Islington on May 6th, “Playtypes Under the Microscope.” His
attitude towards inclusion is that kids are kids, whether they have special or additional needs or not. He doesn’t distinguish
among children.
I think there are times when children will need additional support. Still, that support should
allow them the opportunities for rich play experiences, complete with sun and rain and cold and heat that all children need
to thrive. They are not made of sugar any more than any other children.
Some kids may need additional provision
for extreme weather, but everything is possible. Children with special or additional needs must have equal opportunities for
sand and water play, to play on the swings and by the fire. They need to build dens and laugh with their peers.
People working with children with special needs often find it more convenient
to deal with an inside environment—or would prefer to be in the warm and the dry—and therefore might confuse their
wishes with those of the children. Children want and need to play outside. These kids should not be kept on the inside looking
out. They need to be in the thick of things, children among children.
 Bob Hughes referenced his book Play Types: Speculations and Possibilities
Written by Bob Hughes and edited by Gordon Sturrock, this is the first book published
by Playwork London. Using the work of evolutionary scientists, Bob Hughes explores where the playtypes come from, why
they exist and whether what we think we see when we observe children playing is what is actually going on.
To
order a copy please contact playworklondon@aol.com
 April 29 Return to the Junkyard Part 2 Down the years, many adventure playgrounds have lost sight of their original purpose.
Many have come to resemble adult-led after school clubs, play schemes or youth-style clubs. If we want to call them adventure
playgrounds, do we really want pool and table-tennis tables, wide-screen TVs and computer gaming stations? Then what should a playground be?
Ideally, kids would leave their front
door and there would be their play environment—rich in challenges, natural, free and full of other kids to play with.
In today’s environments, especially urban environments, those boundless opportunities are not there. Adventure playgrounds
should attempt to replace that play environment in the best way they can. It can never be the same, because adults are involved,
but with a junkyard playground and sound playwork practice, we can meet most of these needs.
 April 19
Return to the Junkyard I envision a return to junkyard play
• out of doors,
and involving all the elements
• using minimum technology,
• in close
communication with the environment,
• rich in loose parts,
• with
organic growth in the playground structures,
• with child initiated den-building for shelter
rather than an indoor play space
Junkyard play brings us back to the fundamental purpose of the playground.
In the junkyard playground, children have complete freedom to use anything within the play environment for their play.
In this vision, building moneys go to the play environment rather than to indoor activities better suited to play schemes.
Cooking is done over a fire, or in an outdoor brick oven. We share our tea outside, coming and going from the open fire. We
feel the rain in our faces, the wind in our hair, the heat and the cold.
In this way I envision a return to the
freedom and infinite possibilities of the bomb-site playgrounds from which the adventure playgrounds developed. Literature Connection: Adventure
Playgrounds by Jack Lambert and Jenny Pearson. Penguin, 1974. P. 58 We sat there and drank coffee out of the thermos in the middle of the bare, open space. There
were just a few children on the periphery, looking at us and thinking to themselves, "They must be people who are going
to run the playground." After half an hour or so, one of them ventured over and asked, "Here, mister, is there going
to be a playground here?" "Don't
know," I said. He looked
puzzled and said, "Oh. Well it says there is in the paper." "Oh, yes," I replied. "Well, there probably is, then. Perhaps. It's an experiment,
really." "What are we
going to do?" "I don't
know," I said. "What do you think?"
 April 14 Treehouse Without a Tree
Opportunities
abound on the playground for kids to undertake building projects. Many old telegraph poles still exist from previous structures.
What better basis for children’s own building projects than that?
But how to get them started, when they’ve
not been used to this freedom? Do we leave out loads of wood, nails and hammers, willy-nilly? Or do we intervene and give
the process a kick-start?
We tried the former, and not much was happening—except for a little den-building—so
we decided to intervene and nail up pieces of 6x2 around 4 poles as the basis of a treehouse-without-a-tree (the kids were
always talking about wanting treehouses). With a ready supply of old wood from previous structures, plenty of nails and a
few hammers, the treehouse has taken shape over the past few weeks.
It’s had many incarnations over the
past two weeks—it’s been built up, and had a flat roof. The flat roof was found to leak in the rain, so it was
taken off and a sloping roof installed (Vancouver condo contractors take note). Only two sides of the treehouse are enclosed,
and it looks like a shack from a shanty town, but for many of the kids it’s the first time they’ve taken on a
large-as-life construction project—big enough to accommodate a half a dozen children.
As playworkers, we
haven’t needed to intervene very much, except to ensure that no exposed nails exist to impale young builders. We put
a safety rail up on the open sides to avoid anyone falling two metres to the ground. (Unlikely, but messy if it happened..)
Where to go next? The children have ideas to put a rope ladder and a piece of sewage pipe to make an exit to the next
structure…
Literature connection:
“A unique feature of adventure
playgrounds is the expectation that children will participate in the development and modification of the facilities and services…Construction
provides opportunities for digging, building and creating. The results are often dramatic and add variety and challenge which
enhances the play value of the site and promotes a sense of belonging and ownership among the children.”
Dave
Potter. Risk and Safety in Play: The Law and Practice for Adventure Playgrounds. Playlink, 1997. P. 4
 March
29 Sugar, Sugar? Or Honey, Honey?
How do you reconcile kids’ craving for sugar with healthy eating on the playground?
Children love to experiment with cooking, and many of them don’t get the chance at home. Many of them have
diets full of sugar and the wrong sort of fats.
So when it comes to cooking activities, all the majority of kids
want to do is make sweet, sticky things—flapjacks and all sorts of cakes. As well, they bring candy on site regularly,
their pockets bulging with brightly colored, highly sugared treats.
Children are constructed to love sweets. Their
young taste buds savor sweet in a way adults’ can’t. Furthermore, sugary sweets are often given to kids as a way
of placating, controlling and showing affection. This not only affects their arterial health, but also their behaviour—and
the most challenging kids are the most apt to comfort themselves with sweets.
Refined sugar spikes their blood
sugar, leaving the potential for future health problems, as we see with the rise of Type 2 Diabetes and obesity, in the past
normally associated with adults, but now becoming increasingly prevalent in children and teens.
So why is our
playground kitchen rife with sugar and chocolate? We playworkers need to improve our undertaking of nutrition. We need to
buy natural sweets—apples, grapes, bananas, honey, raisins, berries, apricots….and cook these sweet “superfoods”
innovatively—perhaps cooked over an open fire—or served up as nature made them.
Literature Link:
In
Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Michael Pollan, Penguin Press, 2008.
 “Eat food.
Not too much. Mostly plants.” - Michael Pollan
March 22
Building with Children
H aving looked at a number of
other playgrounds recently, it struck me how little building with children goes on. And the building that has happened has
been for the most part adult-led and undertaken by adults.
Some
adventure playground environments haven’t changed for years. How can we expect children to be involved with their playground
if they don’t get the opportunity to change and develop it? Having just begun a project to build a tree house (without
a tree), which is something the children have been talking about for many months, we playworkers have had trouble in surrendering
the building to the children.
Obviously we have to ensure that a building that is at least 2 meters off the ground,
is secure enough to support the weight of many active children who will want to get involved, but we have to step back and
allow the children’s needs to take precedence, rather than fulfilling our own needs to get stuck in.
Maybe another reason we playworkers avoid the activity of building is that it
creates more work. It does mean you have to check, apart from the usual safety issues, that there aren’t nails sticking
out in inappropriate places and that children aren’t about to launch themselves from two meters up into some horrific
pile of debris below.
Obviously funding for wood and other building materials can be an issue, but there are suppliers—community
groups—from whom you can acquire good used materials at a tenth of the cost of new materials. I know on many local authority
adventure playgrounds, building onto expensive existing structures is either prohibited or frowned upon, but how do we allow
the playgrounds to develop unless we overcome these issues?
Follow developments in our simple building project.
Building involves creative, recapitulative, mastery and social play. (See the Play Types page).
Scuppers the Sailor Dog. Margaret Wise
Brown, illustrated by Garth Williams. Little Golden Books, 1953. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuppers_The_Sailor_Dog
March 16
“Cornell University environmental psychologists reported in 2003 that
a room with a view of nature can help protect children against stress, and that nature in or around the home appears to be
a significant factor in protecting the psychological wellbeing of children in rural areas.”
-Richard Louv,
Last Child in the Woods. Algonquin Books, 2005. p. 49
Not only do studies show that children feel
happy in a natural environment, Louv cites research that shows that kids who grew up to be most environmentally concerned
are those that ranged freely in the natural world. These scientists, environmentalists and other adults passionate about the
natural world were not necessarily taught about environmental issues. In fact, those who’ve had the least input by adults
on the subject may have the most respect for it.
It’s a question of experiencing the world against simply
being taught about it, second or third-hand. We read kids books exhorting them to care for a rainforest half a world away,
without giving them enough chances to develop an intimate understanding of the natural world around them. Kids need to experience
an ongoing, true physical connection to actual trees, grass, soil and water. How can an urban adventure playground help children to connect with the environment
in a small urban setting? How do we develop a playground into a more natural place? I’m going to call a charity that plants trees in urban parks and schoolyards and
see whether they can help us.  March 10
Whither Bicycles?
These days, what absorbs our boys at the playground? Bikes.
They like
to work on bikes. They like to repair their own bikes. Some of our kids don’t have their own bikes. So what do you do?
We decided we needed a regular supply of bikes in need of repair, so we looked around at other bike projects in the
area—bike maintenance and repair projects—to find out where they got their bikes.
The supplier delivered
twelve bikes of varying sizes, shapes and degrees of disrepair. We stored them in our compound to avoid having them go for
a walk on their own.
As soon as the kids spotted the bikes, there was a clamour to have one each. Various kids
worked interchangeably on them and slowly the bikes became usable. The boys, among them our most fractious and challenging,
were completely absorbed in bike repair. As was I—as general and full-time bike repair consultant.
There
is a continuing issue with parts canabalised from one bike to another, and it’s at the point where we need funding to
buy parts. In the meantime, the kids use pocket money to repair their own bikes.
Now we have to decide what we
do in the future.
The bikes will soon be road legal. Do we allow the boys to keep the bikes they fixed, or hold
onto them for playground use?
There are bike projects in the area that take kids for road training.
And
where to go once the bikes are finished and repaired? Do we bring in more bikes and yet more after that—or do we move
beyond bikes, to bike-powered inventions?
“To invent, you
need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” – Thomas A. Edison
 March 4 Playgrounds Search for the Fun in Funding Play has always been the Cinderella service, from one funding crisis to another.
It's always been the first area in local authorities to be cut, and in the voluntary sector it's always been the area to suffer
most from lack of grants. In recent
years, play has become better recognised as a profession, but because it's not a statutory service it continues to suffer
from the vagaries of funding. You can't do your job in play and expect the money to come to you. If you're working in the
voluntary sector you have to fight for every penny to ensure the survival of the playground--and this takes your time away
from the kids. Even though the
government has invested heavily in play, much of that funding goes to new play facilities, while existing play facilities
founder. Overheard at the Eastbourne
Play Conference this week: "My
funding runs out in March 2011." "Mine,
too." "We only have
funding until the end of the year." "We
only have a year's funding at all." It
seems the only viable way of finding funding is through a professional fundraiser, or to spend my time fundraising instead
of working with kids. It's about time there was consistency in the play sector. Why should we allow existing quality play
provisions to die, while spending a million pounds on new and sometimes ill-conceived adventure playgrounds and other play
schemes?
 Feb 23
Loose Parts
Our
school playground structures on the Lower Mainland, B.C. have no loose parts at all—well, maybe seagulls. We have catalogue
playground structures, but they are at least thoughtfully chosen, even though of course not much of a physical challenge for
any child over the age of four. (We’ve all noticed how kids will pep up the catalogue structures, however, with rough-and-tumble,
social and other combined play types.) There’s a play trolley full of balls and hockey sticks that goes out at play
time, but these are not typically seen around the playground structures, so we thought we’d put something out there
by the climbing frames, as a surprise. A box.
A cardboard
box, rectangular and big enough for a kid to sit in.
I
wondered who would notice it, if anyone. I wondered what they’d do with it if they did—I was pretty sure they’d
use it for a boat and slide down the slide on it. It’s a minor sort of slide, and I thought it would be much more fun
in a box.
Instead, the grade ones found it. The first boy put it on his head, and the rest of them chased him
with the object of getting their heads in there too.
Fantastic. Such a simple thing, such original play.
Wish I’d thought of it.
Literature links:
"Loose parts
refers to the recognized need for play environments to contain any number and combination of loose materials, which children
can move around, manipulate, use as props, and use to change the environment. They are a formidable ingredient for enabling
children to engage in play." Bob Hughes,
Evolutionary playwork and reflective analytic practice. Routledge, London and New York. 2001 p.229
 Not a Box, By Antoinette Portis , Illustrated by Antoinette Portis, a
Hardcover title from PC, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 2006. This picture book, charmingly
illustrated, proves it's not a box at all--it's a mountain, a rocket ship... as imagination commands.  February 15A sunny half-term morning—just the moment to build a fire. In this kind of weather, fire is almost an invisible
presence. It's strange the way the heat ripples the air, but comforting in its warmth.
We knew we’d have
a number of groups in, and it being such a lovely cold day, we decided to lock up the building and do all our cooking over
the open fire. Normally, tea travels among the grownups, but when Jonathan asked for a mug of tea, I said, “If we make
our tea on the fire you can all have some.”
We blazed it high, smashing palettes and feeding the flames,
then allowed it to die down to hot cinders. Nearby kids were splashing water, digging trenches, shrieking on the swings. The
grownups were the first to gather around the fire.
We filled up a six litre pot with the hose, boiled it, made
tea and passed it around. Each time it reached the boil, Jonathan was dipping in a saucepan to refill the teapot. He instructed
us in the best way to make tea, the way his mum makes it, adding the milk afterwards. Not all of us agreed.
And
why shouldn’t kids have tea regularly if they want it? It’s such a considerate enterprise, making a cup of tea
for everyone. Making pancakes sparked other ideas for cooking on the fire—soda bread, jacket potatoes, cheese and beans.
How to make cheese and beans. Puncture and foil wrap five kilos
of smallish potatoes, plunge them into the embers. When just about cooked, put 4 or more cans of baked beans into a pot and
heat. Serve beans on potatoes, sprinkle with cheese.
 February 7, 2010 The boat really hadn't had much attention lately. It sits between the monster in the
sandpit and the loos and catches your eye as you enter the playground, but the kids had been passing it by for months as they
ran for the swings or the fire. Then the last couple of weeks, everything changed. One group of kids took a load
of material from our loose parts bin and covered the bin in all manner of sheets and tarpaulins to make their own private
space. Other groups of boys and girls, aged 8 to 11, followed. They painted the inside. They brought in their own music
systems. Now they come and go, these groups. For them it's a private space that fulfills that innate need for
humans to build shelters. Give kids the raw materials, and they'll nearly always build shelters.
Even older kids, if they have the materials, will build more sophisticated shelters and will
drag in furniture to create their own spaces away from the prying eyes of adults.
How fascinating to watch recapitulative
play, to remember our own experiences of den-building, shelter-building, the deep satisfaction that comes upon entering one's
own place. There's a genetic need for humans to build shelters. There are few places in cities for children to play out this
need. . Have you memories of den-building or fort-building
as children? If you've got a moment to write them down, our email address is below. We publish such recollections in our page,
"How Did You Play?" Literature connection Recapitulative
play is "play that allows the child to explore ancestry, history, rituals, stories, rhymes, fire and darkness.
Enables children to access play of earlier human evolutionary stages."
‘A Playworker’s
Taxonomy of Play Types’ (PLAYLINK, second edition 2002). Bob Hughes. Available from PlayEducation, 13 Castelhythe,
Ely, Cambs CB7 4BU
31st
January 2010
I've been reading Jack Lambert on adventure playgrounds. “The trouble with most adults is that they tend to forget what it means to be a child.
Nowhere is this limitation of adult sensibility more apparent than in the way adults provide for children’s play…They
plan, they spend, they provide elaborate ready-made facilities, they engage supervisors to see that these expensive facilities
are not broken or misused.
The tape across the new playground entrance is formally cut, the children rush to their
new toy and everyone is delighted. But time passes and attendance falls off. The novelty is over. Now and again a group of
kids will drop by to have a go, but the centre of play has returned to the street, to their own world where they feel free
to make and adapt and change their patterns of play, following where imagination leads them. This is where the adventure playground
comes in. It starts at the opposite end of the spectrum from generous councilors with highly developed play facilities. A
space is provided…where children can do things they are normally prevented from doing.”
--Adventure
Playgrounds by Jack Lambert and Jenny Pearson. Penguin, 1974
The view from January 2010:
We’re still slotting in colourful catalogue playgrounds…the kids
still tire of them.
And unlike in 1974, most children don’t even have freedom in the streets. Through our
perceived need to protect children from all possible harm, or due to tightly-scheduled lives, children are often limited in
their play time to their bedrooms, playrooms, or the back garden, if they’ve got one.
They’re not
on the streets, learning how to survive in modern traffic. They’re not with kids adults don’t know, learning how
to get along with more than one sort of personality or to keep their heads in groups. They’re not learning to assess
risks while they’re still too young to drive a car. They’re not in wild green spaces, connecting with their own
environments through the five senses.
So far have we come from children having any sort of independent life outside
their own minds—or, importantly, the privacy of their connections with and through television and computers. Plugged
in to electronic media, they feel independent. Playing electronic games or watching video, they feel the thrill of danger.
In the Web, they meet and goof with their friends. In real life, they're not allowed outside on their own.
Playwork practice, theory, science and
literature connections
The Gardening Bug November 13
We talked to the kids
at the playground about growing our own food in raised boxes. They surveyed with pleasure the allotment area abutting the
playgrou nd. “Wouldn’t it be great to have smelly things!” (We hoped she meant herbs.) “It’s great to be able to pick fruits off bushes.” (He’d been picking blackberries
out of the thorns). “I want to grow things like potatoes and carrots and cook them
over the fire.” The playground has acquired a few raised beds alongside the allotments.
We hope our new connection with the allotments and their gardeners will allow the kids to be part of the community of gardening
enthusiasts. I’m looking forward to seeing our kids wrist-deep in soil, planning
a year-round garden, with seasonal foods to prepare and cook on the open fire. We hope kids will come closer to the natural
environment—what little can still be found among the housing blocks that dominate Shadwell. The
kids are going us one better, though. They want to see a wild area, like the one the playground used to have before a block
of flats was built on that spot. It was called “the forest”, and they want another one, with branches above and
dirt underneath. They want to be able to enter a space where the sun turns the light green. When it rains, you can sit under
a bush and hear the pattering sound it makes on the leaves.
“Got dirt?
A study conducted by Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, has found that a bacterium given
to mice helped them navigate a maze twice as fast. The bacterium in question is has found that a bacterium given to mice helped
them navigate a maze twice as fast. The bacterium in question is Mycobacterium vaccae, a natural soil bacterium commonly ingested
or inhaled when people spend time in nature. The effect wore off in a few days, but, Matthews said, the research suggests
that M. vaccae may play a role in learning in mammals. She speculated that creating outdoor learning environments where M.
vaccae is present may ‘improve the ability to learn new tasks’. Smart pill, meet smart bug.”
Richard Louv, The nature principle: human restoration and the end of Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books
of Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2011. P. 31
Our Object All Sublime Oct 23 The boy’s mother had arrived
at the frayed end of a short rope.
When I asked if “Larry” would be coming in today she said, “No.
He’s been bad at school. He’s been bad at home. He has to be punished.”
This boy’s problem,
or rather part of it, is that he has a lot of energy, much of it misdirected into ferocious temper tantrums, weeping and sometimes
violent behavior. He’s eight.
Part of the reaction stems from an incident last week at the playground when
he lost his temper with his parent, who asked him without warning to stop playing and come home. It was such a violent outburst
that they left again without him. Between that and misbehavior at school, he was to be banned from the playground.
His behaviour merited consequences. Still, it seems that often at home and at school, this challenging children are punished
by depriving them of playtime. Parents and teachers, aware that children love their playtime, want to set consequences that
the child will care about. If he wants his playtime so much, they may reason, he’ll behave.
It sounds logical,
but it’s counterproductive. Setting aside the fact that a child in a spin can’t picture consequences, there’s
the problem that without a natural outlet—play—energies become even more unmanageable, and the child grows more
bitter, angry and resentful of control.
When his mother allowed him to return to the playground, and the family
car arrived to pick him up, we asked for 10 minutes’ wait time so that Larry might finish his play and head out with
his friends. He played happily within the natural rhythm of the play session and left calmly when time was up.
His
mother came in and said, “I’m thinking about not letting him come to the playground at all.”
I
said, “It’s better that he’s here than in a two-bedroom flat. He can play through issues here, and let off
steam. He gets attention from his friends and the staff without any baggage or judgment. Each day’s a clean start here.”
Everybody needs friends, elbow room and warmth. Control at home, control at schoo—everybody needs a break.
“I certainly do,” his mother said.
“Leave him at the playground,” I said, as he
played ball
chattered sense and nonsense
poked at the fire
raced snails
hugged a friend
laughed
uproariously
ran and ran and ran Keeping the Focus
October 10 It’s about not losing the focus of what adventure playgrounds are meant to bring
to children’s lives.
Each adventure playground brings a different interpretation of the spaces that children
once carved out and colonized for themselves—out of bomb sites, vacant lots and whatever wild spaces were within their
reach.
Don’t let’s get sidetracked from this vision—especially with the pressures of funding,
which can lead us to commit to projects that are not true to the philosophy of the adventure playground and rich free play.
We have to advocate messy, risky, noisy, freely chosen outdoor play.
Even if there’s money available
for computers, or homework clubs or sports programmes, we have to keep our focus. No one else in the country is providing
urban children with independent free outdoor play but adventure playgrounds.
Fire. Water. Challenging structures..
Constant connection with the outside environment. Child-centred. Child-led. Child-structured if structured at all. Mud. Sand.
Wind.
Gotta Build October 3
“That was a tough day,” I find myself saying. Again. Words
like fractious, aggressive and cranky fit some of the kids these past weeks. It affects the whole playground, and I’m
looking for the cause.
I’m working with them on bikes every day, but the kids seem increasingly discontented.
Partly, there aren’t enough bikes to go round. Yesterday we had six bikes on the go and about 15 kids, some doers and
some patio chair advisors. Bikes are not enough. They need more challenges in the playground. They need to focus on exciting
projects.
In the early days of adventure playgrounds, activities centred around building projects—big structures
designed in consultation with the kids who’d be using them. Kids helped scrounge materials from around the borough—from
building sites, builders’ yards, and their own homes. This was serious fun, engaging and challenging. It meant that
the playground was always changing, and energies were focused on improving the playground in ways that pleased and benefitted
the kids.
I survey our structures and the problem is clear. Large, challenging structures built of telephone poles
set six feet into the ground can’t be easily changed on a regular basis. Smaller structures won’t challenge the
active climber/scrambler. However, these large structures can be added to, using lighter weight materials.
The
kids love building—dens, platforms to serve as stages, swings. But for bigger projects, we need more and better materials.
We have a never-ending supply of pallettes, which are great
for temporary dens, making stages and bike ramps, with the broken bits feeding the daily fire and cooking our food. But pallettes
are not robust and do not survive hard use.
So the answer is to use lightweight poles and lightweight planks held
together with nails, screws and studding—almost like a giant set of Meccano. The larger structures and their ten-inch
diameter poles provide a strong skeleton from which to work. The lightweight “Meccano set” can be knocked down
and redesigned at will.
So what we’re looking for now is a cheap source of recycled wood.
“In Lady Allen’s view, the junk playground was a place where children
could experiment, be encouraged to build and create their own space away from the street. The playground would be an environment
that had endless possibilities and could never be considered immutable, unlike those with man-made fixed equipment. In her
view, the adventure playground had three functions: to recreate the kinds of play that adults had enjoyed in their own childhoods,
to answer critics who felt that children’s use of their free time was “empty and purposeless”, and to meet
the needs of children who ‘do not enjoy organised games, playground asphalt and mechanical swings.’”.
Nils Norman, An architecture of play: a survey of London’s adventure playgrounds, Four Corners Books,
2003. P. 18. Teens on the Playground If you’re not mindful, older teens
can take over a playground. Yet teens need to play, even though they are in the process of outgrowing the playground.
Some of them handle the transition with grace—visiting now and then, volunteering for a little while before
finding other employment. With others it’s a bumpier ride, and one of the last things you want in an adventure playground
is a tree-house full of sixteen-year-olds, smoking and bullying the little ones.
So just how do you deal with
these grownup-sized kids?
With respect, of course—if you shout, you may reap what you sow. And it’s
important to reason with them individually, adult to adult.
The success of your reasoning will depend on the relationship
you’ve built with them all along—the greetings, the good-natured banter, the help with their bikes, the listening
ear…and you must believe it, teens are great fun. These are intense, witty, interesting people with one unsteady foot
in childhood and the other in the adult world.
“You’re going to have to leave, mate.” I speak
calmly and neutrally to the first of the kids, on his own. I know these kids and like all six of them. “People have
asked you not to pick on the little ones, and you’ve chosen to carry on.”
“It’s not my
fault,” he says, aggrieved. They always want one more chance. “It was the others who were doing it.”
“You were all involved, and you’ve all been spoken to. So you have a choice. You can go now, and we’ll
say no more about it. If you want to come in tomorrow, go now.”
They all leave in the end, with some good-humoured
insistence from me, and trying-it-on protestations from them. They’ll zip off to the youth club around the corner for
a game of pool, where they’ll be among the youngest there.
When next we see them, I’ll talk to them
again. They’ll be fine—hanging out around the fire, fixing bikes, building dens, helping with the cooking. You
see, here, they’re the oldest.“If the child is one that you already have a good relationship with, then the chances are that he will accept that moment
of authority quite happily when he sees the reason for it.” -Jack
Lambert and Jenny Pearson, Adventure playgrounds. Penguin, 1974. P. 70 August 11 Cheap as Chips: It’s
a Junk Food City
At least 25% of the kids in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets are classified as obese
by the age of eleven.
Despite the efforts of the council and health authorities one of the main causes is a proliferation
of junk food shops in the borough. The score now stands at 42 of these shops for each and every school. This comes to over
six hundred shops selling fast food in Tower Hamlets.
A typical shop here in East London offers cheap fried and
battered chicken and sausages, burgers, pies and chips, most of it of poor quality and high in fat. To be fair, they offer
kebabs with salad, but I’ve never yet seen a kid eating one of these. Often left to their own devices, a couple of pounds
in their pockets to buy something to eat, kids will always look for the best value for money.
Kids get hungry,
and they love to eat. Often, they won’t have breakfast; then they’ll eat chicken and chips for lunch, and in the
mid-afternoon, and again at night.
A few days ago, one of our boys disappeared from the playground at lunchtime
and came back with a yellow cardboard box in his hands.
“What have you got there?” I asked him.
“Chicken and chips.”
I said, “Give us a chip then.”
When he opened the box, the contents
were smothered in ketchup and mayonnaise.
I said to him, “We’re cooking. Don’t you want some curry
and rice?”
He dug into the yellow box. “No, I don’t like that stuff.”
By four in the afternoon,
he’d come back with another box of chips.
In Tower Hamlets, the ratio of junk food shops to schools is almost
twice the national average. Cheap, battered and fried prepared foods are pictured in the windows of the large grocery stores
in the area.
The Tower Hamlets council has tried to introduce regulations which govern the quality of food within
the license granted to each shop. They want to enforce it, but legislation is stalled.
One chicken and chips shop
made four applications for planning permission and a license to operate. Four times it was denied, the fourth time by a High
Court decision. The shop applied again and was successful. So’s the business, we assume—chips are cheap. Fire
We have a fire in the playground even when it’s
hot out—a big open fire in a pit dug for the purpose.
Why, when the sun’s grilling the tops of our
heads?
Without fire, the playground seems empty at its centre. We start it up later in the warmer months, in the
afternoon when the peak hours of heat are over. Fire for cooking, for making cups of tea… everyone gathers at the fire
at some point or other. In a way, fire connects a small community like ours, the way it has done through the ages in small
and large gatherings, uniting all ages with its energy and spark. One of a group of Park Rangers, here on a training session,
reminded us that pre- and post-war, East London left the city en masse, hop-picking in the summertime--families in the country
on a working holiday. He said the parents went round the pub, while the kids built a fire and talk and friendships grew around
it.
Kids stay late when the days are long. Their play alters with the weather and the seasons, but fire is always
at the heart of the playground. "...in my childhood fires were things one sat by in solitude, feeding the
flames, staring into the embers and wathing the smoke drift; they were a focus to dance around and sing by--ritual places
which facilitated rites, conversations and reflections; they were feeding places where beans were heated, spuds baked and
chippatis cooked; they were places where everyone had a job--to fan the flames, feed the flames or get some water. Fires created
communal areas where childhood culture was passed on and they were places to learn of life's dangers and thrills." -Bob Hughes, Evolutionary playwork and reflective analytic practice. Routledge, London
and New York. 2001. p.8 Why Do They Do It…?
A seven-year-old came running
up, saying two of the other boys were peeing in the treehouse.
They wanted me to pee in it,” he told me,
“but I didn’t want to.”
“Good for you,” I said.
The two nine-year-olds
were heading for the playground exit. I stood in the doorway and asked for an explanation.
The first brazened
it out. “It wasn’t me.”
The second turned on him. “It was you,” he protested.
“You showed me how to do it.”
At such moments, it’s important to keep some perspective on matters.
Young boys have always peed on things. I’m not sure whether it’s a doggy sort of rite of passage or a wish to
experiment with physics, but boys pee on things.
I sighed. It had been a year since anyone had peed untowardly.
The last boy had grown since then, and would be mortified to be reminded of it now.
While I kept my perspective,
the nine-year-olds fidgeted, keen to get away.
I did them a deal. Either I’d talk to their mums, or they’d
take a mop each and a bucket of disinfectant. A moment of indecision followed, but the thought of the wrath of their mothers
outweighed the hardship of mopping out the treehouse.
The task was nearly finished when their concentration waned.
It was a good enough job.
Consequences to misdeeds are vital, thus the mop and bucket. The tricky bit was not
coming down on them with my judgment of their actions. They knew it was wrong. They reaped the consequences. But because no
judgment was offered, they’ll be doing their own judging, which is far more effective than the adult bollocking they
expect and ignore.
Well, it’s all part of childhood. With any luck, it’ll be another year before the
next bucket of bleach.
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
From Chapter 2... "Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush.
He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board
fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden."
Macbeth: A Play within a Playground June 2011
In his memoir An Actor’s Life, Gielgud said that during World War II the soldiers were the best audience
of all, because they didn’t know what was going to happen in Hamlet.
The soldiers watched agog, and that’s
how the kids watch Cornucopia’s production of Macbeth, put on for the East London community in Glamis Adventure Playground.
It’s a stunning production that makes exciting use of the playground structures. The designers have blended leather-and-studs
costumes with tech-dressed uniforms, lamé and sequins… it works, and everywhere details playful and dire catch
your eye.
The groups of kids among the mostly adult audience dart from one scene to the other, a bit like schools
of small fish, settling by the basket swing (now the feast table from beneath which rises Banquo’s ghost) or trailing
the Porter as he involves a couple of laughing audience members in his jokes.
Rehearsals have been happening during
play sessions at the playground, and several talented kids in their teens have taken important roles—Malcolm, son of
Duncan and the Weird Sisters, for example, do very well among the cast of gifted professionals. The playground is theirs,
some of the actors are theirs… and the play lives. Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, comes to Glamis Adventure Playground.
From the 24-25 June, 7.30pm
Glamis Adventure Playground, 10 Glamis Road, E1W 3EG, Tower Hamlets
Website
info: Cornucopia Theatre Company’s community Shakespeare project, Macbeth & his Lady, teams up local 11- to 20-year-olds
with professional actors from the company to train, rehearse and perform side by side. This is an urban, site-specific production
that highlights the intersections between local culture – hip-hop, bhangra, Caribbean and Brazilian carnival and more
– and Shakespeare’s classic text.
Free
cornucopiatheatre.co.uk
“Freud said that life is all about being able to love and work. And I think it is about those things. But
it’s also about play. Play can bring back the past, but even if it doesn’t, play is now; play is fun. More than
ever, I have the feeling that all of what we do that counts is just love and work and play.
And for me, because it makes
the other two even better, the best of these is play.”
-Alan Alda, Never have your dog stuffed and
other things I’ve learned. Random House, New York. 2006
Water World May 2011
It’s good
to see kids getting out to the playground and playing in water. Kids whose parents have been telling them not to get wet,
that they’ll “catch cold”, are now sending them to play with an extra set of clothing.
Sometimes
the kids are occupied for hours, digging lakes or constructing sand castles, tunnels and strange and wonderful structures.
Or maybe they’ll be taking it in turns to soak each other and shriek and run, splashing incidental parents
sitting nearby. After all, it’s the kids’ playground and adults must take it as it comes, we remind them, wringing
out our own shirtfronts.
Kids will play with water until they’re shivering. They’ll splash it on sand
structures to see how they melt, will toss it in great sheets across the pathways and make the grass glitter, will pour it
down the slides. They’ll fill up water balloons and attack everything and everyone in sight until the game overlaps
the edge of chaos and becomes actually chaotic* and a playworker steps in to bring it back to a level where all the children
are again enjoying their play.
*from the Scottish Play Commission, 2007:
"…Arthur Battram
began with the premise that as play is a function of all primates, it is innately essential to human beings. He presented
the model that an effective play environment is an environment which operates on the edge of chaos. Arthur illustrated how
the complexity of play is a transient, dynamic phenomenon, poised between order and chaos, and that the duty of Playworkers
was to support rather than manage. He highlighted that play is not about childcare or education, and urged delegates to challenge
the "Elfansafety" culture; to focus on the benefits of play; and to change the focus from problems to solutions.
Play is serious, as it is through play we become humans…."
Link: www.playscotland.org/scottish-play-commission
Outdoors for a Week
April 2011 Sunshine Coast, B.C.
It occurs to me that a lot of the eleven-year-olds
who come on Outdoor Ed with our school haven’t had much of a chance to play in the rain.
But as rain looms,
we’re a small group entering the temperate rainforest through an arched natural doorway into a cathedral-like space.
Here it’s quiet but lush with hemlock, cedar, huckleberries, salal, skunk cabbage with its brilliant decorator blossom,
sword and deer ferns… and not much else. These are the trees and bushes that are happiest here in Egmont under the
sun-filtering canopy of the conifers, and naming them feels powerful.
It’s a privilege to watch kids in
the wilderness. This is my second group of nine, and I’ve just told them, go play in the woods. They had a
little solo time out of sight of the world, and noticed the sounds birds make. Now they’re finding huge logs to climb
on where they perch, calling like birds.
The last group were chatting and didn’t seem to hear the birds,
but they pushed deep into the woods on their own and found they could orient themselves with the camp once they’d passed
out of view. They’re so used to being watched that most had been unaware of their ability to find their way back in
an unfamiliar place.
These kids live in flat delta at the mouth of the Fraser River. They love the challenging
ups and downs, the mossy boulders and boggy hollows of the forest. They stamp their feet against the soft echoing soil made
of rotted plant life rather than the black loam back home. It’s pouring rain here in the rainforest, but you hardly
notice it under the canopy. Anyway, rain’s just water falling from the sky. Why does snow get all the love?
Now two of the bird-calling girls disappear over a big hill into the farther trees, and I begin to wonder where they’ve
gone. The littlest among the boys breaks from his friends and runs among the trees and ferns up over the bluff. I stop myself
from calling to him.
The conversationalists in the trees
have forgotten I'm around and are singing developmentally necessary kids' songs about poo, playing a jellybean word game they
appear to have made up on the spot and bouncing each other on the logs. The two girls return from the deeps and I see that
the littlest boy has rejoined the people tree.
The third group I bring in wants to climb up high on things and
balance. These kids look for the longest, most difficult logs to balance on, except for the boy with anger issues who deconstructs
a rotten stump. As he stabs at its side with a stick, the red sawdust he makes looks just like the sawdust the insects produce
when they bore their holes.
“Kids never get any freedom” a tall boy in my fourth group says as I send
them out to solo. There’s a well-kitted out boy from a German family who spends half his life canoeing and hiking, and
I see him leaping down the cliffside like a small plaid deer. The sun’s come out for this group. warming the moss and
striking white lights from the low salal. All the kids have disappeared into the forest. Again, with 15 minutes to go, I stop
myself from calling about to them by holding my hand over my mouth. I’ve just been telling them how in my youth I’d
spend the day alone in the woods with a paint box and a sandwich.
I sit on damp red sawdust with my back against
a nurse stump as the sunlight finds its way down to me, while the kids’ shouts ring out among the birdcalls.
"I am on my mountain in a tree home that people have passed without ever
knowing that I am here. The house is a hemlock tree six feet in diameter, and must be as old as the mountain itself. I came
upon it last summer and dug and burned it out until I made a snug cave in the tree that I now call home.”
-Jean Craighead George, My side of the mountain. Puffin Modern Classics, New York. 1959. Kids in Cottonwool March
What we hear: Watch your children every second; cushion them with rubberized
play surfaces—not grass! not sand! because there could be cat poo and it could kill them; equip them with cell phone
locators in case they’re snatched; don’t let them take the bus, any stranger, including and especially that old
gentleman, is a possible predator. If you’re good parents, and you have the resources, then thank your happy fortune
that you can keep your kids sealed up under your eye inside a thoroughly-equipped, technologically appealing house. Spend
your money and watch them, watch them… or they will die alone and it will be your fault. The sales appeal.
It could sell us sniffer bottles of clean air if it could make us think our children would be better for having them.
Of course, the greatest of sales appeals result in all of us parents as crusading reformers, spreading the word.
So, it’s no wonder we parents tend to see ourselves as the last line of defense between our children and herds
of human and non-human predators, all of them poised to spring on the front steps. Our fear grows from necessarily protective
parental instinct but is fueled to an unnatural level by, on one hand, storytelling in the media (and when you write a story,
you think how can I make this story matter deeply? Some writers answer, emperil the kid.) and on the other
hand, varied and enterprising money-makers in the business of childhood products and services, dealing out fear to haul in
profits.
We’ve been sold the line that our primary duty must be to keep children healthy and safe from injury.
It is not—that’s our primary duty with babies and toddlers. Our duty and our joy is to raise our children by encouraging
gradually increasing independence, so that they can keep themselves safe and healthy while delighting in the wonder and thrilling
challenges that the world affords. That’s confidence. That’s happiness. I believe neither of those is for sale.
Nature provides the “cottonwool-ing” a child needs at first, within the parent’s natural instincts
and in the infant itself. Literally within, to start—the foetus cushioned in fluid inside the mother’s body. Next,
the child spends a lot of time against the mother’s body, warm and fed—secure and loved. As the child reaches
toddlerhood, it’s as if he or she were on an invisible string—running away from the parent and right back, running
away a little further…and right back. Independent life begins.
Or, suffocation of their natural independence.
"I believe that society is currently making grave errors about where
its young should be in its list of priorities and thinking. Rather than being seen increasingly as recipients of services
and being smothered by adults’ neuroses, children need instead to experience the elements, know the freedom to range,
have insights into the lives of other species and take lots of risks. That is a parental as well as a governmental responsibility.
It is a species issue for all of us to consider." -Bob Hughes, Evolutionary playwork and reflective analytic practice. Routledge, London
and New York. 2001. p.145 Goodnight, Sweet Rat February We heard shrieking outside the open playground gates—girls screaming, the delighted
edge to the noise unmistakable.
They rushed into the playground
with the news that they’d found a dead grey rat in the roadway. They tore back out again to investigate further, prodding
it with shoes and sticks.
One of the older girls recovered
it, bringing it into the playground on the end of a long forked stick. Playground staff saw it coming and weren’t too
happy. However, after some discussion, the rat was brought in for a proper burial.
The fire was going, and that inspired the first idea: “Let’s cremate it.”
But one of the Bengali boys said, “Let’s bury it with kindness.”
The group decided they would bury it. But one of the girls said, “We need
to give it a name.”
“Let’s call it Bob,”
piped a second girl.
A third child added, “But we
need to say a few words before we cover it in soil.”
She whipped out a bible she happened to have in her school bag and read a passage. One of our autistic boys put his hands
together. So there the ceremony was, with a mixture of all faiths, and no faith, involved.
The formalities complete, the children covered Bob over in soil and the stick that brought
him into the playground was used as a marker for his burial place.
You’ll have perceived the progression of steps from squeamishness, to curiosity, to pity, to respect that the children
passed through, unaided. Dealing with death is something children need to come to terms with but don’t often get the
opportunity in such a direct way nowadays. The ceremony gave them the opportunity to discuss death amongst themselves and
adults. That’s a pretty important experience in a culture where children regularly see fictionalized, surrealized and
sanitized death in the media (or animal death in a plastic wrapper on the supermarket shelf).
Later the following week a school party came in. One of the smaller girls approached the head
teacher. “We have a dead rat. Would you like to see it?”
It was decided that Bob would prefer to rest undisturbed.
“Life is morally messy.” Richard Louv, from the 2007 documentary film
“Where Do The Children Play?” For more information on this video, go to www.allianceforchildhood.org.ukIn children’s literature, a child deals with the death of his cat in Judith
Viorst’s wonderful story The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. Illustrated by Erik Blegvad.
Simon & Schuster, 1971. The Return of the Kid January 2011 Heard near the playground…
“Why haven’t you been in?”
“My dad says he doesn’t want me out when nights are dark early.”
“Tell your dad then nights are shorter now…”
During the freezing weather of December and early
January, the number of kids at the playground reduced to a hardy band of about twenty regulars along with a few fair weather
friends. Nearing the end of January now, with lighter nights and less drastic temperatures, there’s been an influx of
kids who haven’t been in for nearly two months.
We’ve seen a revival of construction activities—and
plenty of deconstruction. With any new year, there’s a healthy movement for change. We see chasing games and banterish
arguments we’ve missed through deepest winter.
Children, it seems, have been mostly kept indoors, no doubt
due to parents’ fears of harm due to dark and cold. (See the NPR article, below, as a pediatrician discusses “Why
Kids Hate to Wear Coats”)
They throw their coats wherever they are when they feel the burden and constriction.
The coats blow like banners from fenceposts, towers and swings.
A pediatrician reassures @ NPR: Why Kids Hate to Wear Coats
You'll find a new entry
Jan 22 on our Children's Lit page. Articles:
Fireside Comfort January 2011
Tomato soup, pumpkin soup. Daal and chickpea curry. Bean stew, pots of tea…
As January drizzles on, fire continues to be the heart of the adventure playground. Time and again, kids come and
go from the smoking, sparking centre of all the action. One kid sits and cuts onions while a littler one pokes the fire and
makes it jump. Another pours tea and passes a mug to his pal, the two sitting elbows on knees, their hands wrapped around
the hot brew, staring into the fire.
When soup’s on, everyone turns up—not in a fuss, because there’s
enough for all, but not too slowly either, because (to the surprise of one or two of the more conservative eaters) it’s
good.
It’s not just good, it’s comfort. Not the swift numbing pleasure of sugar and starch, but the
enduring comfort of intelligently spiced, hearty fare. A homey comfort, away from home.
Given a choice, at the
end of a difficult day, with rain-soaked shoulders and a wearied brow, will you reach for sweets, crisps or soup? I suppose
it all depends on what you learn to love as a child. “Eat
food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” - Michael Pollan The Attention-Seeking Kid November 2010 He snatches up a pot of paint and sprays it everywhere.
She nicks a bag
of marbles or someone else’s phone from the office and dashes away.
He climbs on the roof and won’t
get down.
Of course, you recognize the play cues. And what do you do with the child that is consistently seeking
attention, through anti-social behaviour? Does a facility like an adventure playground have the capacity to deal with children
like this? Because there are many.
Ideally, the environment will be stimulating enough for him or her to find
something to do—bicycle repair, den building, go-cart building. The playground needs to change and develop in ways that
are exciting to the child. But it may also be the reality that this child needs one-to-one contact with a sympathetic, friendly
adult.
The adult needs to set aside some time to pick up on the child's play cues before they get anti-social
or extreme, but without allowing the child to control and monopolize the adult’s time, because other children will become
discontented and jealous. Finding a balance is important, because we can’t lose sight of this fact: we’re trying
to create an environment where the adult is only a facilitator for the most part, so that the children have a chance to play
as if there were no adults around.
“Certainly when a child asks for help we should respond, but we should
be aware that the more help we give the more the experience is adulterated and the more the children may become dependent
on the help that would not—in adult-free circumstances—have normally been available.” Bob Hughes, Evolutionary playwork and reflective analytic practice. Routledge, London
and New York. 2001 p.98 Delight October
2010 When a parent offered to bring bags of sweets to the playground for Hallowe’en, it got me thinking about
how we love to make children’s eyes light up.
It seems to me that one of the great things about being a
parent is the joy we feel watching children’s faces bloom with wonder.
The easiest way is to bring them
a creatively iced cupcake. Well, it has not escaped us that children love sweets, and they love presents. Their eyes light
up when they receive them, so that makes us happy. Then as our kids grow older, they can search for that elusive feeling of
wonder as they buy themselves sweets and return home at night with a crisp bag of new clothes or the latest phone.
So what about Hallowe’en, I ask myself? When I was little, you made your own costume (or belabored your mom to sew
one to match your dreams), you ran out into the night with friends your own age—without adult supervision. You rang
strangers’ doorbells and they gave you candy or—now, this was a horrible thrill of unimaginable proportions—you
had to come up with a trick before they did. Stirring, scary, fun.
Of all this, what is left? Candy. I mean, sweets.
A plastic bag costume your mom got on sale the year before. Fireworks…
Fireworks. There you
go. Nothing to take home, nothing sweet, but oh! The glory. And the show is short-lived, so you long for it again. You can
hold a little one on your shoulder and exchange wows with the bigger ones. As well, here in the UK, Guy Fawkes Day is really
more like it: a bonfire! There’s a stirring sight, hot with danger and excitement.
Take them to see the fireworks.
And for god’s sake, give those kids sparklers and let them write their names in the dark.
"You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy." ~Eric Hoffer
Is My Child Making Friends? October 20
He was a completely different child when his friend walked
in.
His face lit up, and his whole body seemed to relax.
For most of that session at the playground, the temper and anger that are usually there had disappeared, even when the two
boys weren’t actually playing together.
It’s hard for kids to find friends these days. Time outside
school hours is often consumed by organized sport and other endeavours, like shopping with a parent--it’s hard to find
friends when you’re following a shopping trolley through the aisles at Tesco. Even when you are among other children
in organized activities such as football or ballet, most of your moments are adult-coached or adult-directed, and the only
child-to-child time tends to be in the dressing rooms, being hurried along, or on the edge of the field awaiting the next
change of player. At school, friendships must fit into a narrow break time. Friendships at home—“play dates”—are
often arranged among parents, rather than by the children themselves.
At the playground, children mix with a wide range of peers, with absolute freedom of choice as to who is their friend.
They have a chance—they have hours—to make friends with kids they might never have spent time with, individually
and in groups. They gain the all-important experience of playing with and around kids they don’t actually like. Long-term
friendships grow; short-term friendships between children who may never meet again bloom and vanish into happy memory. Outside
the home, there is nothing more important to children than their friendships, and the more opportunities they have to learn
how to make friends, the happier they will be as they grow up and move on through life. "Children have a right to make their own friends. As a playworker you
will be working to create a firendly atmosphere in which children, and young people, can get to know one another. However,
they will make the choice over whom they wish to be their more regular companions. You will make an exception to leaving choices
entirely up to children if one or more of the users of your play setting are being ignored or deliberately excluded, apparently
because of their race or gender, or because of a disability." Paul Bonel & Jenny Lindon. Good Practice in Playwork, 1996. Stanley Thornes (Publishers) Ltd.
(p. 43).
September 25, 2010 What Have You Got? Part 2
By the campfire, stirring the pot of bean stew: “What’s that, then? I’m not eating that.”
“Do you know what it is? Why don’t you try it?”
“…Hmmm. That’s all right…
I’ll have a little more, then.”
And he came back for three more lots.
Where do we go now
after we’ve spent the summer outside (it’s been rather a damp one)? We’re now moving into our season of
mists and mellow fruitfulness—and it’s coming up dark, cold and wet. We’ve experimented all summer with
cooking different sorts of food outdoors, from vegetable stews to whole meal pancakes with cheese, to all manner of beans
and pulses and whole meal dough twisted around a stick and toasted over the open fire.
What we haven’t experimented
with is producing basic bread, mainly because we’ve nowhere to cook it. Now is probably the time to get our hands dirty
experimenting with constructing a clay oven and producing some whole meal bread in loaves. Having recently read Kiko Denzer’s
book Build Your Own Earth Oven, and having recently acquired two and a half tons of soil and a pile of sand, we’re
in good shape to start building some small experimental earth ovens, working up to building a full-sized oven, which we can
use as part of our outdoor cooking programme.
The procedure’s fairly straightforward and has been practiced
for many thousands of years, using many of the same material as for Cobb housing. Simply put, you build a form with wet sand
or such, slap a mixture of clay, sand and straw around the form, allow the clay to dry a little. Excavate the sand form through
the doorway cut in the front and set a fire inside to cure the structure.
The theory is that this type of oven
produces convective, radiant and conductive heat, and should produce some of the finest whole meal loaves in East London…after
a certain amount of happy trial and error, producing, possibly, some of the finest doorstops in East London.
"Radiant heat is fundamental to our very existence--from it we have
sun and seasons, photosynthesis and weather, food and shelter, and of course, wheat and bread. The architect Christopher Alexander
says that humans have a biological preference for radiant heat--his answer to why people prefer an open fireplace to an open
heating vent. Perhaps that's another reason why bread is better baked in a wood-fired oven..." Denzer,
Kiko, & Hannah Field, Build Your Own Earth Oven: A Low-Cost, Wood-Fired, Mud Oven. 3d edition, 2006. Hand Print Press.
(p. 9).
September 6, 2010 What Have You Got? Part 1
At least he brought a banana.
I peered into the blue carrier bag the eight-year-old had brought with him. Lunch.
In toto: two Shoobs (gel in a tube), a Fruit Shoot (sugar drink), a packet of chocolate fingers and a chocolate latte
cake.
And the banana. Thank God for that.
How’s that lunch for you-are-what-you-eat? And we wonder why some kids seem
on a permanent high. But the immediate problems of this sort of diet are the least of it—it’s the long-term health
issues., like the unprecedented levels of Type 2 Diabetes in children, usually found only in adults, high levels of obesity
and all the physical and emotional damage that causes.
In
their lunches we notice colas, flavoured sugar drinks and energy drinks like Red Bull. Rare is the bottle of unflavoured,
pure water. We see sandwiches of chocolate spread on white bread, and we see infinite varieties of crisps.
Or no lunch at all, and three pounds to spend—on what? Guess…
It’s easy to understand. We hear the reasoning from friends, from co-workers,
from the children’s parents, and out of our own mouths as well: "If they don’t like it, they won’t
eat it. And they’ve got to eat something."
Kids
will eat when they’re hungry. What they eat… I had another peek into the blue carrier bag as the kids ran off
at the end of the day. The eight-year-old had played hard in the open air and had clearly raised a fine appetite for lunch.
Gone were the Shoobs, gone the Fruit Shoots, the chocky fingers, the cake. But there was something in the bulge at the bottom
of the bag. Something…
“Hey,” I called
after him. “Hey, wait—you forgot your banana.”
Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, writes: “It’s not an exaggeration to talk about contemporary children
being addicted to junk. Psychologist Deanne Jade, founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders, explains that highly
flavoured food works in the same way as drugs. ‘It changes our mood and it impacts on the chemicals and neurotransmitters
in the brain in a similar way to alcohol, nicotine and cocaine.’ The extent of physical addiction is considerably
less, of course, but as the British nutritionist Dr Susan Jebb puts it, ‘Children develop very strong learned preferences—junk
food can become a psychological addiction.’
Sue Palmer. Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children
and What We Can Do About It. Orion, 1006 (p.23)August 25 Health, Happiness and Welfare
How much do
we as a nation value our children? It would seem, based on statistics over the last few years, that we don’t value them
very highly, with the UK coming near the bottom in terms of children’s health, happiness and welfare. (they all have
cell phones, though).
How is it that countries like the Netherlands regularly feature at the top of these lists?
What is it that they’re doing differently?
One of the answers is, they’re investing in their children.
If you look at the UNESCO and OECD reports on per capita spending on children, they come out consistently higher than UK governments
expenditures. When the crunch comes, we safeguard our banks, but not our children.
It’s important to note
that many countries—like the Netherlands, Denmark, Fermany and Sweden—invest heavily in play provision for children, and it’s become a way of thinking
when they build new towns and housing developments. In the UK, play provisions are often an afterthought. There, it’s
built into the legislation. Here, it’s often an afterthought. "Joy is our birthright, and is intrinsic to our essential design. For highly competitive, serious
people to realize that they have missed this joy canbe devastating. Perhaps this fact lies behind the culturaly supported
idea that people who play are superficial, are not living in the real world, are dilletantes or amoral slackers." -Stuart Brown. Play:
How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul. Avery, New York, 2009. Page 147. July 23 Playday
Isn’t every day “Playday”?
“Playday” is a celebration of the
right of the child to play (see the UN Rights of the Child page, above). Like all celebrations, it blends fun and profile-raising,
particularly raising awareness of the importance of play in children’s lives. Adults are encouraged to come inside play
provision spaces—adventure playgrounds—to see what goes on.
I’ve arranged Playdays that saw
1 500 children and as many adults attend, with stacks of cardboard for den-building, unicycles and stilts, storytellers and
a mobile farm. The advocacy was far-reaching, although the danger with arranging an “event” such as this is that
it can become highly organized, with activities arranged by adults. In the end it can resemble a huge birthday party or after-school
club, and then where’s your advocacy for rich free play?
What we should be aiming for is a normal play provision,
well advertised, where children are free to choose what they do. Maybe the ideal would be a feast of loose parts with playworkers
present to facilitate. Adults can come and see how their children will take old boxes, sand and water or loose parts and play
freely. There’s an opportunity to talk with people who understand play and can explain the benefits of freely chosen
play.
On such a Playday, adults and children can get a good idea of what’s on offer at the adventure playground.
People are often used to thinking of colourful, unchallenging catalogue playgrounds or “pocket parks” as play
spaces, and how boring these can be for children, compared with their games cubes. Take the same children to a play space
rich with loose parts and the company of other children, all full of imagination, playful spirits popping away, and watch
what happens—originality of thought, social connections, vigorous movement and voices raised in shouts and laughter. You can Google Playdays, and visit London Play Playdays at www.londonplay.org.uk/document.php?document_id=23
-
July 15 Summer's Here--Go Out and Play Part 1
“And is it any wonder that the digital generation is the fattest in human history? You don’t need to be a dietician
to work out that sitting on your arse watching reruns of OC or playing Maelstrom does not burn many calories. Britain’s
Institute of Child Health estimates that for every extra hour of TV a five-year-old child watches on the weekend, his risk
of obesity in adulthood rises by 7 percent. Research from the UD suggests that children who watch over two hours of television
a day are more than twice as likely to suffer from hypertension linked to weight gain.”—Under Pressure:
Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting. Carl Honoré. HarperOne, 2008
A number
of years back I read an article about athletes having spent a day copying children move for move for about 12 hours. The athletes
couldn’t keep up.
Children, playing as the spirit takes them, in a space that offers room to move, exercise
and strengthen every bit of their bodies. Adventure playground staff check regularly with the guides to play types to ensure
that all play types can be accessed by the kids as they want and need them. At the same time, their young minds are playing
with the ideas, information and skills that school and other experiences bring them.
Time to go outside and play!
July 2 Bullying in the Playground
The results of bullying have created some very big headlines in recent years. No one of
us wants to see any child pushed around or abused by his peers to a level where life is intolerable. Physical or emotional bullying is painful and destructive for the victim and for the child doing
the bullying. Some bullied children consider or actually do take their
own lives. There are cases where children have taken their victims’ lives as well.
Zero tolerance for bullying
is the watchword for many schools and playgrounds. But here’s the problem. No matter how much control you exert, bullies
will always exist. How do children deal with bullying when there’s no safety net and adults aren’t present to
protect them?
If children are perfectly protected as they grow up and thus have no experience in dealing with
bullies, what happens when they meet that first bully in the workplace?
How does a child learn to stand up for
himself? And how does he learn to stand up for another person?
At the playground, for example, you might observe
a ten-year-old picking on a seven-year-old. It’s probably more effective if a twelve-year-old peer intervenes in that
set-up, rather than a grownup. The bully will pay more attention to one of his peers, and the victim gets a model of how to
deal with the bully.
It must be closely and carefully monitored, hour by hour and day by day. Like any risk assessment,
you don’t allow it to put the child at serious risk of emotional or physical harm before we intervene.
~ I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating
a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these
words he epitomized the history of the human race. ~ Bertrand Russell
June 14 Ending a Play Session
Most of us really dislike being interrupted
when we are engrossed in something we like doing. Children are no different.
When children come into the adventure
playground, they choose what they want to do, whether it be alone, with other children or with the playworkers on site. If
adults are invited into the children’s play and become part of the play cycle, they must be aware of signals from the
children as to whether they are still need or should find a way of bowing out.
The same is true when a play session
is nearing its end. As adults we may be weary and are looking forward to the end of the day, and going home. However, as playworkers
we should be intensely aware as to how the children are feeling as the session is wound down.
Just think how it
feels to a child, intensely involved in their play, only to have an adult shouting at them, saying that they have to finish
playing ‘now’ and ‘off you go’.
How about spending fifteen or twenty minutes before the
session ends, letting the children know, sensitively, that they should think about winding up, what they are doing. Then go
around say five minutes before closing to say that time is almost up. This gives the children to complete their play cycle
or at least put it in a place that they can pick it up again another time.
What we want to avoid is the child being
jerked out of their play, which almost inevitably leads to aggravation for all.
One recent example is of an eight
year old who was deeply involved with some snails. No one had warned him that his parent was collecting him early to go somewhere
he didn’t want to go. This turned into screaming match, with the child being grounded because of his behaviour. Had
we let this child know what was happening and when, there is a good chance that this whole incident could have been prevented.
If all of this is done in a gentle and calm way, the chances of the adults getting away on time are greatly increased,
as most children are ready to go. June 2 Nature in the Playground
In his 2005 book, Last Child
in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv writes:
“More time in nature—combined
with less television and more stimulating play and educational settings—may go a long way toward reducing attention
deficits in children, and, just as important, increasing their joy in life. Researchers at the Human-Environment Research
Laboratory believe that their findings—if replicated and broadened by additional research—point to nature therapy
as a potential third course of treatment, applied either in concert with medication and/or behavioral therapy, or on its own.
Behavioral therapy and nature therapy, if used collaboratively, might teach the young how to visualize positive experiences
in nature when they need a calming tool.” Richard Louv, Last
Child in the Woods. Algonquin Books, 2005. p. 107
How
does this apply to adventure playgrounds? If we look at the early days of adventure playgrounds, they were places where children
could experience many of the joys of nature, but over the years the ethos seems to have changed, moving towards a more indoor
and youth-club orientated format. So how do we bring some of the connections with nature back into today’s adventure
play?
A recent opportunity developed when an old plastic boat full of water was left to stagnate for some time.
In it the children spotted tadpoles, maggots and other insects. In another instance, a kid lost his key in the nettles. In
his frantic, stinging search for the key, he came across a colony of snails. This developed into a week-long project of snail
racing and snail observation by many of the children, out of sheer fascination brought on by close contact with these creatures.
The children have long been attempting to make a connection with the semi-wild cat that lives under the building.
Many children in this urban setting live in flats where pets are not allowed. Although the cat is wary of people, the children
have learned to accept Knightrider for himself. They’ve built him a shelter and take turns in feeding him. They greet
him as one of their own.
We may not have a pond or a river, or an abundance of open space, but with careful management
of the site, we can develop some opportunities for kids to connect with the natural world.
May 20 Playground Memories A man dropped by Glamis today, bringing a couple of kids to the playground. He remembers playing
the playground space in the mid-sixties before the first Glamis adventure playground went up in 1967. He said in the early
days it was “a bomb site” and thought the children’s hospital that stood on that spot might have been bombed
in the war.
In the mid-sixties and before, people in the neighbourhood used to use that piece of ground as a playground,
but also on such occasions as Guy Fawkes night, when they had a big neighbourhood bonfire.
He used the playground
when it was set up originally until the early seventies. He and his friends lived in Shadwell Basin, and used to go swimming
in the docks across the road, and then head the playground, stinking of the Thames. (The woman in charge used to tell them
to get out of the building because they stank so badly.)
He left a tenner and said “Thanks for the memories”.
He’s one of ten or twelve who remember Glamis before it closed in 1992. It closed and became a wild area full
of cats when the GLC was abolished and the funding dried up. It’s drying up now. We’re working hard on fundraising,
trying to find the financial support for the capital moneys and for salaries. Or at least for cat food.
In the literature:
"Play can become a doorway to a new self, one much more in tune with the
world. Because play is all about trying on new behaviors and thoughts, it frees us from established patterns." -Stuart Brown, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates
the Soul. Avery, New York, 2009. Page 92.
May 10 Inclusion at the Adventure Playground
I heard
Bob Hughes speaking on Inclusion at his seminar in Islington on May 6th, “Playtypes Under the Microscope.” His
attitude towards inclusion is that kids are kids, whether they have special or additional needs or not. He doesn’t distinguish
among children.
I think there are times when children will need additional support. Still, that support should
allow them the opportunities for rich play experiences, complete with sun and rain and cold and heat that all children need
to thrive. They are not made of sugar any more than any other children.
Some kids may need additional provision
for extreme weather, but everything is possible. Children with special or additional needs must have equal opportunities for
sand and water play, to play on the swings and by the fire. They need to build dens and laugh with their peers.
People working with children with special needs often find it more convenient
to deal with an inside environment—or would prefer to be in the warm and the dry—and therefore might confuse their
wishes with those of the children. Children want and need to play outside. These kids should not be kept on the inside looking
out. They need to be in the thick of things, children among children.
Bob Hughes referenced his book Play Types: Speculations and Possibilities
Written by Bob Hughes and edited by Gordon Sturrock, this is the first book published
by Playwork London. Using the work of evolutionary scientists, Bob Hughes explores where the playtypes come from, why
they exist and whether what we think we see when we observe children playing is what is actually going on.
To
order a copy please contact playworklondon@aol.com
April 29 Return to the Junkyard Part 2 Down the years, many adventure playgrounds have lost sight of their original purpose.
Many have come to resemble adult-led after school clubs, play schemes or youth-style clubs. If we want to call them adventure
playgrounds, do we really want pool and table-tennis tables, wide-screen TVs and computer gaming stations? Then what should a playground be?
Ideally, kids would leave their front
door and there would be their play environment—rich in challenges, natural, free and full of other kids to play with.
In today’s environments, especially urban environments, those boundless opportunities are not there. Adventure playgrounds
should attempt to replace that play environment in the best way they can. It can never be the same, because adults are involved,
but with a junkyard playground and sound playwork practice, we can meet most of these needs.
April 19
Return to the Junkyard I envision a return to junkyard play
• out of doors,
and involving all the elements
• using minimum technology,
• in close
communication with the environment,
• rich in loose parts,
• with
organic growth in the playground structures,
• with child initiated den-building for shelter
rather than an indoor play space
Junkyard play brings us back to the fundamental purpose of the playground.
In the junkyard playground, children have complete freedom to use anything within the play environment for their play.
In this vision, building moneys go to the play environment rather than to indoor activities better suited to play schemes.
Cooking is done over a fire, or in an outdoor brick oven. We share our tea outside, coming and going from the open fire. We
feel the rain in our faces, the wind in our hair, the heat and the cold.
In this way I envision a return to the
freedom and infinite possibilities of the bomb-site playgrounds from which the adventure playgrounds developed. Literature Connection: Adventure
Playgrounds by Jack Lambert and Jenny Pearson. Penguin, 1974. P. 58 We sat there and drank coffee out of the thermos in the middle of the bare, open space. There were just a
few children on the periphery, looking at us and thinking to themselves, "They must be people who are going to run the
playground." After half an hour or so, one of them ventured over and asked, "Here, mister, is there going to be
a playground here?" "Don't know,"
I said. He looked puzzled and said, "Oh. Well
it says there is in the paper." "Oh,
yes," I replied. "Well, there probably is, then. Perhaps. It's an experiment, really." "What are we going to do?" "I don't know," I said. "What do you think?"
April 14 Treehouse Without a Tree
Opportunities
abound on the playground for kids to undertake building projects. Many old telegraph poles still exist from previous structures.
What better basis for children’s own building projects than that?
But how to get them started, when they’ve
not been used to this freedom? Do we leave out loads of wood, nails and hammers, willy-nilly? Or do we intervene and give
the process a kick-start?
We tried the former, and not much was happening—except for a little den-building—so
we decided to intervene and nail up pieces of 6x2 around 4 poles as the basis of a treehouse-without-a-tree (the kids were
always talking about wanting treehouses). With a ready supply of old wood from previous structures, plenty of nails and a
few hammers, the treehouse has taken shape over the past few weeks.
It’s had many incarnations over the
past two weeks—it’s been built up, and had a flat roof. The flat roof was found to leak in the rain, so it was
taken off and a sloping roof installed (Vancouver condo contractors take note). Only two sides of the treehouse are enclosed,
and it looks like a shack from a shanty town, but for many of the kids it’s the first time they’ve taken on a
large-as-life construction project—big enough to accommodate a half a dozen children.
As playworkers, we
haven’t needed to intervene very much, except to ensure that no exposed nails exist to impale young builders. We put
a safety rail up on the open sides to avoid anyone falling two metres to the ground. (Unlikely, but messy if it happened..)
Where to go next? The children have ideas to put a rope ladder and a piece of sewage pipe to make an exit to the next
structure…
Literature connection:
“A unique feature of adventure
playgrounds is the expectation that children will participate in the development and modification of the facilities and services…Construction
provides opportunities for digging, building and creating. The results are often dramatic and add variety and challenge which
enhances the play value of the site and promotes a sense of belonging and ownership among the children.”
Dave
Potter. Risk and Safety in Play: The Law and Practice for Adventure Playgrounds. Playlink, 1997. P. 4
March 29 Sugar, Sugar? Or Honey, Honey?
How do you reconcile kids’
craving for sugar with healthy eating on the playground?
Children love to experiment with cooking, and many of
them don’t get the chance at home. Many of them have diets full of sugar and the wrong sort of fats.
So
when it comes to cooking activities, all the majority of kids want to do is make sweet, sticky things—flapjacks and
all sorts of cakes. As well, they bring candy on site regularly, their pockets bulging with brightly colored, highly sugared
treats.
Children are constructed to love sweets. Their young taste buds savor sweet in a way adults’ can’t.
Furthermore, sugary sweets are often given to kids as a way of placating, controlling and showing affection. This not only
affects their arterial health, but also their behaviour—and the most challenging kids are the most apt to comfort themselves
with sweets.
Refined sugar spikes their blood sugar, leaving the potential for future health problems, as we see
with the rise of Type 2 Diabetes and obesity, in the past normally associated with adults, but now becoming increasingly prevalent
in children and teens.
So why is our playground kitchen rife with sugar and chocolate? We playworkers need to
improve our undertaking of nutrition. We need to buy natural sweets—apples, grapes, bananas, honey, raisins, berries,
apricots….and cook these sweet “superfoods” innovatively—perhaps cooked over an open fire—or
served up as nature made them.
Literature
Link:
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.
Michael Pollan, Penguin Press, 2008.
“Eat food.
Not too much. Mostly plants.” - Michael Pollan
March
22
Building with Children
Having looked at a number of
other playgrounds recently, it struck me how little building with children goes on. And the building that has happened has
been for the most part adult-led and undertaken by adults.
Some
adventure playground environments haven’t changed for years. How can we expect children to be involved with their playground
if they don’t get the opportunity to change and develop it? Having just begun a project to build a tree house (without
a tree), which is something the children have been talking about for many months, we playworkers have had trouble in surrendering
the building to the children.
Obviously we have to ensure that a building that is at least 2 meters off the ground,
is secure enough to support the weight of many active children who will want to get involved, but we have to step back and
allow the children’s needs to take precedence, rather than fulfilling our own needs to get stuck in.
Maybe another reason we playworkers avoid the activity of building is that it
creates more work. It does mean you have to check, apart from the usual safety issues, that there aren’t nails sticking
out in inappropriate places and that children aren’t about to launch themselves from two meters up into some horrific
pile of debris below.
Obviously funding for wood and other building materials can be an issue, but there are suppliers—community
groups—from whom you can acquire good used materials at a tenth of the cost of new materials. I know on many local authority
adventure playgrounds, building onto expensive existing structures is either prohibited or frowned upon, but how do we allow
the playgrounds to develop unless we overcome these issues?
Follow developments in our simple building project.
Building involves creative, recapitulative, mastery and social play. (See the Play Types page).
Scuppers the Sailor Dog. Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated
by Garth Williams. Little Golden Books, 1953. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuppers_The_Sailor_Dog
March 16
“Cornell University environmental psychologists reported in 2003 that a room with
a view of nature can help protect children against stress, and that nature in or around the home appears to be a significant
factor in protecting the psychological wellbeing of children in rural areas.”
-Richard Louv, Last Child in
the Woods. Algonquin Books, 2005. p. 49
Not only do studies show that children feel happy in a natural
environment, Louv cites research that shows that kids who grew up to be most environmentally concerned are those that ranged
freely in the natural world. These scientists, environmentalists and other adults passionate about the natural world were
not necessarily taught about environmental issues. In fact, those who’ve had the least input by adults on the subject
may have the most respect for it.
It’s a question of experiencing the world against simply being taught
about it, second or third-hand. We read kids books exhorting them to care for a rainforest half a world away, without giving
them enough chances to develop an intimate understanding of the natural world around them. Kids need to experience an ongoing,
true physical connection to actual trees, grass, soil and water. How
can an urban adventure playground help children to connect with the environment in a small urban setting? How do we develop
a playground into a more natural place? I’m going to call
a charity that plants trees in urban parks and schoolyards and see whether they can help us. March 10
Whither Bicycles?
These days, what absorbs our boys at the playground? Bikes.
They like
to work on bikes. They like to repair their own bikes. Some of our kids don’t have their own bikes. So what do you do?
We decided we needed a regular supply of bikes in need of repair, so we looked around at other bike projects in the
area—bike maintenance and repair projects—to find out where they got their bikes.
The supplier delivered
twelve bikes of varying sizes, shapes and degrees of disrepair. We stored them in our compound to avoid having them go for
a walk on their own.
As soon as the kids spotted the bikes, there was a clamour to have one each. Various kids
worked interchangeably on them and slowly the bikes became usable. The boys, among them our most fractious and challenging,
were completely absorbed in bike repair. As was I—as general and full-time bike repair consultant.
There
is a continuing issue with parts canabalised from one bike to another, and it’s at the point where we need funding to
buy parts. In the meantime, the kids use pocket money to repair their own bikes.
Now we have to decide what we
do in the future.
The bikes will soon be road legal. Do we allow the boys to keep the bikes they fixed, or hold
onto them for playground use?
There are bike projects in the area that take kids for road training.
And
where to go once the bikes are finished and repaired? Do we bring in more bikes and yet more after that—or do we move
beyond bikes, to bike-powered inventions?
“To invent, you
need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” – Thomas A. Edison
March 4 Playgrounds Search for the Fun in Funding Play has always been the Cinderella service, from one funding crisis to another.
It's always been the first area in local authorities to be cut, and in the voluntary sector it's always been the area to suffer
most from lack of grants. In recent years, play
has become better recognised as a profession, but because it's not a statutory service it continues to suffer from the vagaries
of funding. You can't do your job in play and expect the money to come to you. If you're working in the voluntary sector you
have to fight for every penny to ensure the survival of the playground--and this takes your time away from the kids. Even though the government has invested heavily in play, much of that funding
goes to new play facilities, while existing play facilities founder. Overheard at the Eastbourne Play Conference this week: "My funding runs out in March 2011." "Mine, too." "We
only have funding until the end of the year." "We
only have a year's funding at all." It seems
the only viable way of finding funding is through a professional fundraiser, or to spend my time fundraising instead of working
with kids. It's about time there was consistency in the play sector. Why should we allow existing quality play provisions
to die, while spending a million pounds on new and sometimes ill-conceived adventure playgrounds and other play schemes?
Feb 23
Loose Parts
Our
school playground structures on the Lower Mainland, B.C. have no loose parts at all—well, maybe seagulls. We have catalogue
playground structures, but they are at least thoughtfully chosen, even though of course not much of a physical challenge for
any child over the age of four. (We’ve all noticed how kids will pep up the catalogue structures, however, with rough-and-tumble,
social and other combined play types.) There’s a play trolley full of balls and hockey sticks that goes out at play
time, but these are not typically seen around the playground structures, so we thought we’d put something out there
by the climbing frames, as a surprise. A box.
A cardboard
box, rectangular and big enough for a kid to sit in.
I
wondered who would notice it, if anyone. I wondered what they’d do with it if they did—I was pretty sure they’d
use it for a boat and slide down the slide on it. It’s a minor sort of slide, and I thought it would be much more fun
in a box.
Instead, the grade ones found it. The first boy put it on his head, and the rest of them chased him
with the object of getting their heads in there too.
Fantastic.
Such a simple thing, such original play.
Wish I’d
thought of it.
Literature links:
"Loose parts
refers to the recognized need for play environments to contain any number and combination of loose materials, which children
can move around, manipulate, use as props, and use to change the environment. They are a formidable ingredient for enabling
children to engage in play." Bob Hughes,
Evolutionary playwork and reflective analytic practice. Routledge, London and New York. 2001 p.229
Not a Box, By Antoinette Portis , Illustrated by Antoinette Portis, a
Hardcover title from PC, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 2006. This picture book, charmingly
illustrated, proves it's not a box at all--it's a mountain, a rocket ship... as imagination commands. February 15 A sunny half-term morning—just the moment to build a fire. In this kind of weather, fire is almost an invisible
presence. It's strange the way the heat ripples the air, but comforting in its warmth.
We knew we’d have
a number of groups in, and it being such a lovely cold day, we decided to lock up the building and do all our cooking over
the open fire. Normally, tea travels among the grownups, but when Jonathan asked for a mug of tea, I said, “If we make
our tea on the fire you can all have some.”
We blazed it high, smashing palettes and feeding the flames,
then allowed it to die down to hot cinders. Nearby kids were splashing water, digging trenches, shrieking on the swings. The
grownups were the first to gather around the fire.
We filled up a six litre pot with the hose, boiled it, made
tea and passed it around. Each time it reached the boil, Jonathan was dipping in a saucepan to refill the teapot. He instructed
us in the best way to make tea, the way his mum makes it, adding the milk afterwards. Not all of us agreed.
And
why shouldn’t kids have tea regularly if they want it? It’s such a considerate enterprise, making a cup of tea
for everyone. Making pancakes sparked other ideas for cooking on the fire—soda bread, jacket potatoes, cheese and beans.
How to make cheese and beans. Puncture and foil wrap five kilos
of smallish potatoes, plunge them into the embers. When just about cooked, put 4 or more cans of baked beans into a pot and
heat. Serve beans on potatoes, sprinkle with cheese.
Mail Online: How children lost the right to roam in four generations
Free Play - 'Children need to choose for themselves what and how to play,
for their own reasons and without an obvious goal or reward.'
*see our page on the types of play—intriguing to watch for.
A good day!
|
