Kinder’s Gardens

Euro-Model Playgrounds Mix Children and Nature to the Benefit of Both

By Liz Kirchner

First of all, it’s grassy. And it’s got a little hill. And, if you were riding your trike at recess along the boardwalk, you’d roll past the sand pit with its big stones that are good to sit on and pretend are ships and have interesting textures; and then you’d rumble under the pine branches, which smell good when you rub them, and past the water table where other children are splashing with buckets and turkey basters and watering the blueberry bushes and each other, and on to the bird blind where the cardinals are eating sunflower seeds (which are delicious) and the robins are eating worms (which are delicious to robins). And if you get a little worn out from all this triking, or maybe could just use some quiet time, you might sit under the bean vine teepee, which is like a little cave, or with the teachers under the shady oaks.

Reviving the Wild Child
Eschewing the asphalt and extruded plastic of traditional playgrounds, natural play spaces that couch play and learning in nature-focused settings are beginning to attract real attention. Parents, teachers, psychologists, and health researchers who, remembering their own woods-roaming, stream-splashing, tree-climbing free-range youths, have for years harbored the sneaking suspicion that their children—affixed to video screens, their afternoons fully booked with lessons and practice, or cloistered away from vague safety threats—are missing out.

Those suspicions are voiced in recent books like Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Wilderness, and university research is affirming that our increasingly sedentary, mini-van’d, forest-phobic kids are indeed missing out. There is mounting evidence that children who noodle around outdoors doing what researchers call “wild nature activities unstructured by adult attitudes,” before the age of 11, demonstrate advanced cognitive function, bolstered self-confidence, and sturdier stress management skills.

Not only that, playing in the mud and rolling around in the grass appear to foster an environmentalism that carries on into adulthood. Disturbingly, and certainly boding badly for the future stewardship of the planet, it seems that if a child doesn’t experience the colors, textures, sounds, and hutzpah that comes from climbing on tree stumps and jumping off, digging in leaf litter, learning about worms close up, or just lying under the hydrangeas, that child may lose, forever, the very ability to derive satisfaction from and, as a result, to value the natural world.

But luckily for all of us, natural play spaces—also called natural learning environments, naturalized playgrounds, or children’s play gardens—having sprouted in Europe and Canada, are taking root all over this country.

Two Northern Virginia examples are the CCCC in Arlington, an example of a designed natural learning space, and the Children’s House Montessori School, a certified National Wildlife Foundation Schoolyard Habitat—one of 72 in Northern Virginia, and 102 throughout Virginia.

Serendipity
It’s a rainy spring morning in the CCCC playground before the children arrive. Sandra Redmore, the Center’s fresh-faced director who has a naturally carbonated, can-do optimism that one perhaps finds only in not-for-profit child-care center directors, is thinking about serendipity.

She is remembering last year, standing at the playground gate gazing at the children milling about on the barren wood chips, asphalt, and clay pack. A previous and much-beloved director had retired, urging well-wishers to contribute to a playground fund. We wanted to support imaginative, richer, longer-lasting play episodes. In the catalogues there were Playhouse X and Climbing Structure Y. We knew we wanted more, but we didn’t know what ‘more’ meant.”

The parents and teachers needed advice from someone who knew not just about playgrounds and natural design, but also about early childhood education. So, in those flurries of luck and wild coincidences that happen when capable, creative people start talking and thinking of other interesting people who might help, Redmore met Nancy Striniste, who is both a landscape architect and a children’s natural play space designer. “It was one of those cosmic connections,” says Redmore, “Serendipitous. Early childhood education, kids, and play: there aren’t many designers with those experiences. There’s a dearth of those people.”

In the Forefront of the Forefront
And Striniste, who has been designing children’s natural play spaces for twenty years, is, in fact, quite a find. An undergraduate design class in the 80s introduced her to Swedish schools and childcare center design. “They were beautifully and thoughtfully designed with lots of nature, and I was hooked,” she says.

One of Striniste’s teachers at Tufts described how complex it is to design well for children. “She compared it to designing the interior of a ship or a plane—usually very limited space with very precise requirements as to what must be there and be available to people of a certain size.” Striniste was mentored by North Carolina State University Professor, Robin Moore, who is still the central figure in the design of children’s spaces in the U.S. Before anybody was questioning asphalt and wood chips, they were in the forefront of the forefront of the natural play spaces movement in America.

Fundamentally, as important as it is for a space to be playful and whimsical, says Striniste, there is something more nebulous to be fostered in natural play spaces—something she calls “the magical and the spiritual side of childhood.”

“Think about it: These days children often spend up to 10 hours a day in day care, and from infancy until first grade. That’s a huge amount of time—as much time as you and I spent from kindergarten through high school. A huge part of their childhood is being spent in institutional settings. So those settings have to be worthy of childhood. Sacred spaces of a sort.”

Says Striniste, “I think [natural play spaces] make sense in so many ways. They are appealing to children and to adults in a way we feel but almost can’t put into words. They are restorative and healing and we all need that.”

An Appreciation Of Grubs
When Striniste designed the CCCC’s play space, the urban Arlington nook needed to reintroduce nature by planting native species and building bird blinds. In contrast, the playground at Children’s House Montessori School in Reston seems to be a natural play space almost by default. Its little playground is enfolded in forest, deer come to the fence in the morning, and the children take daily walks through the woods. The key is that it’s the friendly relationship schools develop with their natural world that makes a natural play space work.

At Children’s House, school is over for the day and the children, who are between three and six years old, are going home. Keturah Collins, owner-director, and Karen Disney, assistant director, talk about the appreciation that comes with experiential learning and how the Schoolyard Habitat supports that.

To become a certified National Wildlife Foundation Schoolyard Habitat, the area must provide wildlife with food, water, shelter, and a place to raise their young. Says Collins, “Maybe the most important thing a child learns is caring. Caring about other creatures, caring for the garden, scooping up worms. We see a toad in the garden and we say, ‘that’s his house.’ We’re playing in his space. We put in animal habitats like a ‘toad abode’ (an up-turned flower pot) and a chipmunk house.”

Disney adds, “There’s an appreciation of nature, and more importantly, an overall appreciation of things around them, and not taking them for granted.” In the sun, three little boys are taking turns watering a droopy petunia.

She points out that another incredibly valuable thing about a natural play space is that it fosters an awareness of the passage of time. “We’ve been taking nature walks all year. In the winter, without the leaves, we could see the deer, but not the beetles. Now, in the spring, we see the beetles, but not the deer.” The compost bin also teaches this lesson. “All year we put things in the bin and we talk a lot about what’s going to happen to it and why and we see what comes out of it.”

‘Caring’ and the ‘passage of time’ seems like big, nebulous intangibles, but they’re made delightfully tangible by the huge imaginations that are just flying all over this playground. Scene: There are four little girls playing on a hollowed tree stump. One of them is hunkered down in the hollow, while the others girls pat her back and bring her sticks. The little girl in the hollow is asked, “Are you a little bird?” The little girls reply, “She might be a little bird.” And the girl in the hollow says, “Actually, I’m an egg.” Everyone nods.

Children at both schools also learn to push their ick-envelopes: examining things, or getting muddy when they initially don’t think they’ll like it. At the CCCC, building model playhouses with cob, an ancient Celtic mud and sand building material, one student could not bring himself to put his hands in the mire, “But by the end of the class, he did it. And it was okay,” says Redmore. Then too, some children’s demeanors belie their true adventurous depths, she says.

“Isabella, who wears frilly dresses and ribbons, loves to dig grubs. She cradles them and says to us, ‘Would you like to see my babies?’”

Teachers learn too. Disney at Children’s House says, “Another thing we do is dig for worms and talk about the worms. Not everybody loves worms initially. I never took much of a liking to bugs and spiders.” But, she says, she had to overcome her “aversion to picking them up or holding them so as not to pass on these biases to the children.”

And, at CCCC this morning, Striniste is teaching the CCCC teachers about cob, the muddy building material. Striniste has used shredded newspaper instead of straw for this mix, which is beginning to rot. The teachers scoop up little wads to rub between their fingers, they say, “Oh it’s sandy.” And, “Oh, yes, it does smell bad, doesn’t it,” and everyone nods and laughs.

To Work is to Play
A lot like a dance, the Natural Play Space at the CCCC appears carefree and spontaneous, principally because it takes a lot of work. Teachers must plan lessons, constantly supervise, show, talk, encourage, participate. “But,” says Redmore, leaning forward, “if kids have meaningful play with lots of things to do, there are fewer conflicts. Children need things to do. When they run out of things, they hit each other and run around in circles.”

And the pay-off for small efforts is huge for both the kids and the grown-ups. Striniste talks about the little hill at the CCCC.

“It is such a simple thing,” she says, “just creating a little bump when we did the grading, and covering it with sod. But kids spend so much time there, running up and down the hill, rolling down the hill, lying on their backs and just looking at the clouds. I think they’ll remember that hill.”

Even the work of building the CCCC playground, actually, sounded a lot like fun. “Everything we did was either in the pouring rain or freezing cold,” says Striniste. “Yeah, it was a journey alright,” says Redmore.

They laugh as they stand together in the sun at a joint CCCC-Arlington County event in which community volunteers will build the school’s strawbale trike tunnel. Redmore looks around. “And now we’re here.”

The Process of Play
Like good play, building the play ground at the CCCC was a process that left no one out, Redmore says. “I’m a big believer in process. Talking to the kids…talking to parents. What do we remember from our childhoods?”

Because teachers wanted storage space, handsome cedar storage sheds hold art supplies in the gazebo, shovels and buckets in the garden shed, scoops and pans near the sand pit. The straw bale tunnel doubles as a trike garage.

Teachers also wanted the space to invite “rich pretend play.” In response, Striniste recommended they have a place for a multi-level fort. Also, says Redmore, “Kids like little niches, cozy, safe places.

That’s why Striniste designed two neighboring playhouses instead of one large one. Two little houses also segues into the teachers’ need to quickly and easily see where kids are and be able to help them.”

Parents asked for swings, and swinging is vital for vestibular development, but there was no room for a big swing set. So Striniste, considering safety, comfort and practicality simultaneously, put a porch swing in the middle of the pergola pleasing parents and children alike.

Practical Play
Traditional ideas about education value at-your-desk-academics and undervalue grub-cradling, petunia-watering play. County elementary schools allocate thirty minutes a day to recess. The folks at CCCC and Children’s House already spend a lot more time outside (an hour and a half in the morning, more in the afternoon) than most.

“Play is meaningful learning time,” says Redmore, “This is what learning is. Not just a told thing. Anytime is learning time.”

But, what about safety out there with all those tree stumps, pine needles, and interestingly textured rocks?

“When you give children freedom and open space, the sad thing is, you move farther and farther down the line of liability. It’s more work from all kinds of angles. If you’re a principal at a large elementary school with a different student to teacher ratio…How do you give freedom and growth and safety and structure?”

And then, unflaggingly inclusive and hopeful, Redmore concludes, “There are different answers in different places. Hashing out those things…there are no right answers.

“How you deal with your issues is a large part of your school’s character.”

Collins and Disney agree. “It’s more work,” says Disney, “but it’s fun.” She pauses. A little boy of about five presents himself before her, shakes her hand, looks up at her and says, “Good-bye. See you tomorrow.”

(February 2007)

 

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