They say one never knows the worth of water until the well runs dry. It was on the heels of the most severe drought in recorded history that my family and I recently moved from California to the Pacific Northwest. We’d taught the kids to treat water like gold. We’d kept our fruit trees alive… Read more »
Blogs Tagged: free play
Top 3 Ways Surfacing Boosts Play
Encouraging Beneficial Play with Surfacing Reducing risk while maintaining a fun play area often represents the main focus when discussing a playground’s surface. All of Goric’s Surfacing and Accessories products meet important ASTM standards for reducing the frequency and severity of fall-related incidents. Such risk reductions are supremely important, and they are also only the beginning… Read more »
Micro-Playgrounds: Six Tips for Designing for a Small Space
If increasing urbanization and limited housing stock has led to a wave of micro-units, rooming houses, and residential hotels in spatially constrained cities such as New York and San Francisco, there is a corollary in the world of playgrounds. For lack of a better term: the micro-playground. These compact designs, which typically fit on footprints… Read more »
Top Eight Indoor Playgrounds
For many people, the self-contained indoor soft play areas at McDonalds bring back fond memories. I can remember, myself, at the age of five or six, enjoying a Happy Meal and then spending the next thirty minutes diving into a nest of colored balls. I’m not entirely sure what attracted me to the play areas,… Read more »
Why Sand and Water Play Are Good for Children
Long before the iPad and Pokémon GO, there was sand and water. The two are foundational to the earth and offer near limitless possibilities for young children’s imaginations. During the summer months, I take my two-year-old son to Chicago’s Montrose Beach on the shore of Lake Michigan. After laying out a blanket, I let him dig… Read more »
Scale, Imagination, and Innovation in Modern Playgrounds
When recalling our early playground memories, we remember how awe-inspiring the equipment was to our child’ eye. Often we look back at “the slide that was higher than a two story building” or “the bottomless sandbox” and think of how we begged our parents to bring us back. Although this feeling comes in part from our… Read more »
Honoring Play Enthusiasts: Friedrich Froebel, Gift Play
Friedrich Froebel is the “father” of the kindergarten concept. Froebel studied the natural sciences as well as architecture and had a profound understanding of the interconnectedness between the two disciplines. Under the direction of Anton Gruener, headmaster of the Pestalozzian Frankfurt Model School and in reflection of the teachings of Johann Henrich Pestalozzi, Froebel became a… Read more »
Pushing the Envelope of Playground Design with Risk & Challenge by JC Boushh
In today’s age of tech savvy children playground designers are constantly designing new and innovative play components to attract today’s wired-child to the playground. This approach to new and innovative designs many times comes into conflict with society’s preoccupation with over protecting children from life’s bumps and bruises. As children continuously seek new ways to… Read more »
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