Description

Outdoor play spaces can contribute to children‘s healthy development and learning in important ways. However, changes in society have increasingly limited the capacity of the outdoors to contribute to the educational experience of children. The following describes four crucial aspects that should be addressed when designing outdoor play spaces at childcare centres and schools.

Space: One of the prime rationales for children‘s use of outdoor play spaces is for gross motor play (for example, running). Yet recent studies have found that gross motor movement is decreasing among young children, contributing to obesity in school children. A 2003 study in Yorkhill hospital in Scotland found that children aged three to five spent about 20 minutes a day in vigorous activities.[1] This amount is less than half the 90 minutes of physical activity recommended for children‘s healthy development.[2] Lack of outdoor space is commonly cited as the reason why children do not go outside to play. We know that denser play areas exhibit more aggressive play and less cooperative play, and educators often struggle to rotate the number of children using one play space.[3] Since the groups have to take turns using the outside space it is not freely available to children whenever they want it.

What to do? Be sure that space has been maximised for children’s use. A comprehensive study of outdoor play spaces in Canada found that each child should be allocated 13.5 m² of outdoor space.[4] This number is almost twice as much as space allotted to each child enrolled at present in childcare in North America. Yet the researchers contend that ample spatial provisions are required for the diversity of experiences needed outside for their development while respecting safety standards.[5]

Challenge: Increasingly strict safety regulations pertaining to play equipment have hampered the ability of outdoor play spaces to contribute to vigorous gross motor activity. Stringent safety standards have helped to produce play equipment that is lower in height and less challenging than previously designed equipment. This may account for why a study of children using outdoor play spaces at childcare centres found that 87 percent of the time they were not playing on the equipment.[6] In studied spaces where non-conforming equipment was removed, children resorted to climbing the fences.

What to do? Some safety standards pertaining to children‘s outdoor equipment are voluntary and devised for commercial reasons to promote international trade rather than developmentally rich play.[7] These standards enable manufacturers to market and sell play equipment in different countries rather than designing it for a specific context. However, children need to take risks to develop, so be sure that you discuss with parents, educators and others involved with the project what constitutes an acceptable risk. Also keep in mind that the expensive equipment that is touted as safer by aggressive sales representatives has never been proven to be safer than older equipment. Additionally remember, children can gain challenges from other sources than equipment – big hills to climb up or, if allowed, trees to climb. These elements are not as highly regulated as equipment.

Things that change. Outdoor play spaces should not be separate from the educational experience because they can play a unique role in the process of developing knowledge. While many outdoor play spaces are characterised by asphalt, they can potentially provide contact with living things like plants and animals, which can powerfully express seasonal cycles. Organic matter is in a state of flux, changing with time, and thus contact with living things can promote both memory and language acquisition. In a Canadian study, children spoke more with each other and for longer durations when they encountered worms or bugs.[8] Likewise, contact with plants and animals can not only enhance cognitive development, but encourage imaginative play and stimulate empathy.

What to do? There are plenty of interesting and hardy plants for children‘s outdoor play spaces. A very accessible BBC website identifies plants that are easy to grow, that will stimulate senses and that attract butterflies.[9] Another good source is Plants for Play by Robin Moore. In this book, Moore considers the tactile, auditory, olfactory, visual and play value of different types of plants, and makes suggestions for specific plants for specific play use.[10]

Things that can be changed. We know from the past 160 years of studying children that they need spaces they can manipulate and create as their own.[11] Unfortunately, an increased emphasis on academic readiness and testing has devalued the importance of play at childcare centres and schools. Yet the outdoor play environment is an ideal location for providing this type of play because it can contain sand, dirt, mud, water and other loose parts that can be easily shaped by children. Interacting with the physical world lies at the heart of play. Play is when the integration of knowledge allows for possible alternative worlds, ‘which involve “supposing”, and “as if” and enable us to function in advance of what we can actually do in our real lives.’[12] Play can be an activity performed alone or by groups of children – building the foundations of social play, such as cooperation, required in adulthood.

What to do? Provide plenty of manipulable material and utensils (such as shovels and buckets) that can help shape these materials. Recycle objects like cardboard boxes or plastic pools with holes for children‘s creations. A crucial dimension to utensils and other loose parts is ample, accessible storage. If your school or centre is located in a dense urban area you may encounter complaints that the play space looks messy, but every effort should be made to maintain these messy zones for children‘s play.

School gardens

The inventor of the kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel, was one of the first teachers to use gardening as part of children’s education. During the 1840s he created gardens in his original kindergartens throughout Germany. By the late 19th century in Europe and North America gardens were incorporated into school yards to provide children with important life skills, as well as introduce them to the economic profits of agriculture. In Sweden, Austria, Germany, Belgium and Russia gardens were mandatory at schools, while in England teachers’ salaries were often determined by the productivity level of their school garden. Technological advancements in agriculture, the development of grocery stores, and an increasingly test-oriented academic curriculum made small-scale hand gardening virtually obsolete, so by the late 1930s many schools abandoned the gardens in their yards.

Yet 75 years later we are witnessing a school garden revival. In the UK alone, over 15,000 schools have expressed interest in school gardening activities. School gardens provide experiences with nature and its processes that are now absent from the lives of many children.

Children, and also adults, have forgotten about the miracle of growing food from a small patch of land. Getting involved in gardening not only revives this enchanting process but fosters unique learning opportunities. Gardening not only creates hands-on learning experiences regarding the basic precepts of ecology, but the act of gardening and its fruits can be combined with art, reading, writing, science and even social studies. For example, a school in Chicago uses their wetland garden as part of a writing programme; combining gardening, observation and reflection that are expressed in a daily journal.

School gardens vary in type from food to wetland to ornamental gardens, so thought should be given to determine which type of garden would best suit a specific school yard. Funding outside the normal school budget is also necessary to pay for seeds, soil, tools, storage and fencing. The Growing Schools Programme at Teachernet.gov.uk lists over a dozen sources of funding to start a garden at your school. Garden activities that link to learning objectives are also imperative. While researchers have just begun to understand the role of gardens in learning, we do know some critical aspects that should be considered when creating a school garden.

Multiple involvement. School gardens should not only involve children and their teachers, but maintenance people, administrators, staff, parents and neighbours. Knowledge about gardening cuts across all career fields, so you very likely have an expert at hand who can provide valuable information as well as enthusiasm. Multiple involvement will not only help maintain the school garden over the summer months, but can bring a sense of community to the parents and the school as a whole. This was one of the findings from ‘Grounds for Action,’ a study of school greening programmes conducted by Evergreen Canada. This study also found that 81 % of the survey respondents indicated that their school garden enhanced the aesthetic and social dimensions of the school yard.

Food gardens are extremely popular in school yards, but they are best accompanied by pollinator meadows. The main elements of a pollinator meadow are flowers and wild grasses. These plants attract pollinators, such as butterflies, beetle, flies, moths, bats, birds and ants that are critical to the success of vegetables, fruits and grains. A pollinator meadow will not only ensure the healthy development of food plants, but will extend children’s ecological knowledge about gardens. To ensure pollinator attraction, plants should be selected based on a range of bloom times and their different shapes and colours. Visit Kidsgardening.com and the U.S. Forest Service website[13] which provide names of pollinator plants and the types of pollinators they attract, as well as educational activities for children.

The benefits of a school garden can often be lost on people who think you can only learn from a book. In order to document the educational contributions of your garden it is important that you evaluate the school garden and garden programming at the end of the year. As of now, there is thankfully no standardised test for school gardening programmes, so its important that you measure and demonstrate learning performance in other ways. Learning Through Landscapes, the UK’s National School Grounds Charity, has developed a Measuring Success pack for school gardens.

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www.ltl.org.uk/about/newsarticle.asp?NW_ID=53

This package allows for an evaluation process that can help you measure the learning taking place in your own school garden.

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Originally published in: Mark Dudek, Schools and Kindergartens: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2015.