Designing Early Childhood Playgrounds

Designing a playground for early age kids involves more than choosing age-appropriate equipment. It’s important to design a whole play environment that helps them develop the skills they need and enjoy their playtime.  Whether you are designing for daycare centers or preschools, keeping a few key developmental needs in mind can help ensure that your playground design provides both skills development and fun.

Interaction

Simple interactions with both equipment and environment can give kids experience with how the physical world works. Provide opportunities to push, pull, dig, build, roll, collect, or spill things. Try to include items that have multiple uses and/or settings that the children can alter by themselves to encourage hands-on discovery.

Sensory Engagement

Appeal to children’s senses.  Think beyond brightly colored equipment.  Engage touch, hearing and smell in addition to sight. Textured surfaces and natural materials can provide a range of different tactile experiences. Incorporating trees, gardens, and other natural features adds sensory appeal and encourages movement as well.

Challenge

Consider the importance of risk and challenge. Children are built for adventure. They test their limits through play and repeat skills in order to master them. Provide graduated levels of developmentally appropriate challenges that nurture children’s natural curiosity and taste for adventure, allow them to try out their problem-solving and creative thinking skills, and build confidence.

Imagination

Encourage imagination. Young children have an active imagination and naturally engage in creative play. Playgrounds that include structures like forts, tunnels, and other components that facilitate storytelling and dramatic play allow children to express their creativity, invent scenarios, and act out their imaginary worlds.

Independence

Support individual exploration and discovery.  Playground structures designed to allow opportunities for children to control the environment and select their level of risk without sacrificing safety build confidence and encourage independence.

If you need help designing a playground for your school or daycare center, contact Premier Park & Play at 617-244-3317 or email premierparkplay@verizon.net. 

The Power of Play

What are your favorite memories of childhood play? Chances are those memories happened outdoors and included a lot of nature-based activities like digging holes, chasing fireflies, building stick forts or sand castles, jumping in big piles of leaves, or just fooling around with dirt or water. Mud pies, anyone?

Is it possible to form those kinds of memories today? Childhood has changed. With all the screen time, the lack of access to green space, and the emphasis on direct instruction and increased academic focus  in early childhood programs and preschools, it can be hard to squeeze in unstructured outdoor play.  We need to remember the importance of play in the child’s physical, emotional, and intellectual development.

Play is how children understand each other and make sense of their world.  They learn so much from play that it’s often called the “work” of childhood. Studies show that children learn best in an environment that allows them to explore, discover, and play.

Outdoor play in nature has a powerful impact on a child’s development. Research shows that school playgrounds with trees, fields, shrubs, and vegetated edges encourage creative play and build skills that will be valuable in academic learning too.  

There are entire preschools centered on nature play. One of the first in New England was established in 2006 at the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center in Connecticut.  Several Massachusetts Audubon sanctuaries offer preschool programs.  However, nature play can be designed into the playground of your preschool using equipment designed specifically for early childhood outdoor play.  Nature of Early Play products, available through Premier Park & Play, reconnect children with the natural world through interactions with dirt, sand, water, animals, music, and plants.  Products like the Outdoor Classroom, Nature Bowl, and Garden Roof House provide hands-on opportunities for exploration.  For more information about preschool playground products, please contact Doug Knotts at 617-244-3317 or email premierparkplay@verizon.net.