Nature - Adventure - Play
hey y’all – check out our fun new design for The Highlander School in Atlanta, started by the amazing Rukia Rogers! We’ll be doing a volunteer construction day in 2 weeks – if you’re in the neighborhood stop by. The more the merrier! (and yes: those are SHEEP you see grazing!!!!)
Hee hee – fun times in the big city. Here a group of spirited volunteers got together to plant themselves a hillslide. Nice! Shoveling, pickaxing, gathering free woodchips from a local cemetery, light carpentry and heavy comradery added up to a fun day of work and a great new 4′ hillslide planted in the community’s sweet children’s play courtyard. Yeah!
Here we are: another volunteer community “Swarm Build” — this one at the East Tennessee State University Child Study Center in Johnson City, TN. Fun! We timed it to fit in with the ETSU Early Childhood conference and offered conference-goers a chance to step away from the air-conditioned conference center, put on work clothes, roll up their sleeves, and add some great new features to an already neat outdoor playscape. Together we planted new plants, added bamboo vine climbing poles to an arbor, constructed a boulder-marble-concrete water feature (complete with a kid-controlled water barrel trickle), and created a beautiful tile mosaic mural on a long concrete block wall. Check it out:
ETSU Swarm Build from rusty keeler on Vimeo.
Here’s one way to do it. During a natural playscape build at Faith Childcare and Nursery School in Rochester, NY we had a big space designated as “log climbing area”. Great. But then we needed to get some logs to fill it. We put the word out to parents and sure enough: one dad just that week had a large tree in his backyard cut down and was getting ready to have it hauled away. “We’ll take it!” There. Simple as that. Except now we had to figure out how to move it, cart it, drag it, and get it to the nursery school in one piece (or at least in a couple pieces!) After a bit of head scratching, calculating, figuring and refiguring we were ready to try our schemes (after one dad declared, “impossible!” I knew we’d be successful.) So, with tarps, rope, a lawn tractor, duct tape, chewing gum, and some push carts from the school we coaxed the giant logs inch by inch from the back yard to the front yard where a friendly contractor would scoop them onto his truck and bring them to the playscape site. Yes!
ASK for what you need (logs!), get HELP, be CREATIVE, and have FUN. That’s what community built is all about…
[FMP width=”640″ height=”360″]http://earthplay.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_0462.mov[/FMP]
Here is our first volunteer build of the year in Huntington, WV. I had the pleasure of working with Susan Miller and the spirited folks at the Child Development Academy at Marshall University www.marshall.edu/cda who planned and organized an amazing one-day natural play space community build. Teams of staff, family members, and university students poured in to help with the various construction and landscaping jobs. What a blast!
Willow huts. Herb gardens. Sand pits. Sunflower houses. Tree tunnels. Stepping stones. You probably have a million ideas for ways to spice up your outdoor play space with new natural features. But how are you going to get all that work done?
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