Last month I had the fun pleasure of building a mini “River” with volunteers during a great natural playscape community build at The Butterfly House on the campus of the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, VA. I thought y’all might be interested in the process. Take a peek!
Here we are starting out on a gradual hill about 18″ above the tricycle track grade. We ran a water line extension to this point to plug in our earthplay Water Tower as the water source.
I raked a 6″ deep x 3′ wide path for the river to take and we put down a gravel base and shaped metal “hardware cloth” over top as the reinforcing for the concrete. (the round rocks you see were just to hold the cloth down as we pinned it in place)
Here comes the concrete. We had one team mixing, a wheelbarrower bringing it to the river location, then a team of concreters smoothing and troweling it in place, followed by a group of folks getting to do the fun work of adding marbles boulders and designs in the wet concrete!
Here you can see the back of the EarthPlay WATER TOWER. (and here you can see more pictures and a video of it in action!)
Kids adding fun marble-mosaics too!
a couple of the fun up-close marble design details:
Stay tuned for further pictures of “The River” in action!