Environments for Outdoor Play

A Practical Guide to Making Space for Children

Theresa Casey

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781446227602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

?Theresa?s book is full of lots of inspiring, practical, ?how to go about it ideas? coupled with thought provoking and sometimes challenging comments and views. The range of ideas and information contained in this book will go a long way to support the development of flexible, imaginative, yet not prescriptive play spaces that contribute to supporting children?s play. A very readable and worthwhile publication to add to your resources? - Muriel Young, Grounds for Learning (Learning Through Landscapes)

?This practical book helps the reader plan, design and manage the kinds of settings that afford children the opportunities to carry out the wide range of self-directed activities that are so important to their development. It?s ideal for community development workers, the organizers of after-school programs, children?s hospital staff and groups of caring parents? - Roger A. Hart, Director of the Children?s Environments Research Group, The Graduate School of the City University of New York

?This readable and usable book is full of advice and ideas which will take every professional nearer to understanding the way to provide opportunities for children which the children themselves would want and enjoy... A necessary addition to the bookshelf for all interested in the subject? - PlayRights Journal (online journal of the International Play Association)

?Refreshing and insightful... One of the best things about this book is that Casey offers us a fresh perspective on our role. While we may long for a world where we opened the door and sent children outside to play, we are faced with the reality that, for a variety of reasons, these opportunities are no longer occurring naturally in our communities. It is encumbent upon us now to recreate these "essential childhood opportunities." This will take intentional, thoughtful, informed design. Casey?s book gives us some great starting points. A must read? - PlayRights Magazine

?I like the attention to individuality, children?s perspectives and community. The author brings a strong playwork perspective to considering outdoor spaces, which early years practitioners considering the design of new or refurbished areas should find valuable. It?s crucial to free up our thinking about playful spaces, and this book brings a refreshing focus on working from children?s motivations for play, using playful values (such as choice, spontaneity, freedom and meaning-making) to drive thinking, being careful not to over-design, and the organic growth of a space into a place through the play that occurs? - Nursery World

?Casey?s extensive research and years of practice in award winning play services are very much in evidence in the various techniques and ideas that she describes in this publication... a great resource for any play setting considering setting up or developing thier outdoor play space? - SOSCN News Update

?If you are daunted, but excited, by the challenge of developing your outdoor spaces to meet the needs of all children, this book is an excellent resource? - Early Years Update

Exciting spaces to play are vital if we are to provide children with challenging, flexible, inclusive and stimulating opportunities to learn, develop and have fun together.

This book provides readers with ideas for developing play environments that will meet the needs of the children in their care. It illustrates how improving the play environment also offers a better, more positive way of dealing with a number of issues from inclusion to playground management and the need to promote physical activity.

It includes:

- clear frameworks for designing play environments;

-case studies showing examples of how play environments can be developed;

-ideas and activities which lead to interesting designs, with the participation of the children;

-practical examples, illustrations & photographs;

-research evidence showing the importance of good play environments.

The book is aimed at practitioners and managers in all early years and children?s play settings, and students on education, early childhood, child care and playwork courses. It is also very relevant to playground designers, landscape architects and community education and development workers.

1

Children’s need for time and space to play

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Environments for play make up part of the landscape of childhood. Awareness of the local context and wider trends which impact on children’s lives help us to develop spaces that better meet their needs.

In this chapter we will look at:

• Children’s need for time and space to play and specifically
  • drawing on one’s own resources
  • identity
  • connection to the community
  • social relations
  • contact with nature
  • physical activity.
• A spectrum of play types.
• Building up a picture of play opportunities in your area.

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There is no doubt that children’s access to space and time for play has dramatically altered over the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Many of the concerns that relate to environments for play are indicative of general global trends – a loss of space, the encroachment of adult management into children’s free time, fears about children’s use of outdoor space (because of traffic, ‘stranger danger’, bullying).

Many of these changes give rise to serious concerns regarding the development of children and their immediate and long-term health, wellbeing and happiness. The well-documented increase in childhood obesity and diabetes is noted not only in Hong Kong but also in the UK, in the USA and in Pacific countries. The negative results of inactivity and confinement to indoor spaces will have lifelong implications for those children.

Loss of space for children’s play can be seen every time a playing field is sold off for development or when green space is lost to urbanisation. However, it is not just the physical loss of space that impacts on children. Children are excluded from more and more places for play and not just those (such as railway tracks) that are understandably forbidden.

Increasingly rules and regulations bar children from playing in what were once public spaces (shopping centres and malls replace the public space of market squares and piazzas; theme parks replace public parks; school playgrounds fall under the ownership of management companies and are locked out of hours; young people are corralled into skate parks to avoid their public display). Public attitudes often seem to suggest that children’s play is a nuisance or even a criminal act and that a child playing outside without adult supervision is neglected, even if they are in the street around their home. These notions are sanctioned through the use of curfews and orders to disperse groups of young people in certain areas and in some countries.

Children’s need for time and space to play

The constraints and fears that limit children’s opportunities for play, particularly outdoors, deprive children of essential childhood experiences and opportunities – opportunities to develop friendships and negotiate relationships; opportunities to grapple with the full gamut of emotions including those such as jealousy, boredom or anger, as well as happiness and satisfaction; opportunities to take risks, have adventures and misadventures; to have contact with nature and the environment.

It is because play offers unique benefits to children that the right to play is included in Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which recognises:

the right of the child to rest and leisure, and to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts. (UNICEF, 1989)

Drawing on one’s own resources

In our hurried world, time for play as well as space to play can be in short supply for children whose schedules are as full as a chief executive’s. Individually, schools, childcare, after school activities and clubs have their own benefits, but do they leave enough time for the child to fall back on their own resources? Are children still having a chance to be bored, to hang about apparently aimlessly with friends, to be unsupervised? Is there time for a toddler to dawdle along picking up sticks? Or for an eight year old to mess about on the way home from school or for an adolescent to set aside their timetable and hang out with friends – or for any of us to take time to assimilate our experiences? If not, then an essential ingredient is missing.

Sometimes making space for children’s play has less to do with the physical development of a site and more to do with releasing some time back into children’s control – whether that’s re-introducing ‘recess’ or ‘playtime’ back into the school day, disorganising the programme of a club, or parents taking the decision not to fill a child’s week with activity after activity.

It is often adults rather than children who gain most from the planned programme of a club (which can act rather like a security blanket for us). We tend to worry about what would happen should our children become ‘out of control’ and can be somewhat uncertain as to what we should be doing if we are not occupying the children. And yet, replacing space for children’s own agency with adult agendas largely excludes spontaneity, imagination, unpredictability, flexibility – all the qualities we associate with free play.

Creating time for children’s play allows them the opportunity to draw upon their own resources. Practitioners can support children’s view of themselves as people with a unique mix of skills, talents, capacities and potential. A full life needs us to respond to difficulties we encounter, to face up to conflicts, be flexible problem solvers, to recognise challenges and opportunities when we see them, to learn from difficult as well as pleasurable experiences and deal with disappointment. These experiences in self-directed play provide children with vital opportunities in the development of resilience.

Identity

For children to develop confidence and their own sense of identity it is essential that they go through these processes themselves – these cannot be replaced by adult-managed lessons. Children need opportunities to understand themselves as individuals and in relation to peers and their community. They discover their own preferences, choices and outlook on life, including an ethical outlook. They are striving for independence whilst also struggling with rejection or acceptance of aspects of culture and tradition around them.

If a child’s identity is formed through a complex and fascinating alchemy of environmental adventures and genetic history, then the wider the range of environmental experiences on offer, the more opportunities there are for supporting each child’s developmental journey. (Zini, 2006: 29)

Connection to the community

We do not feel a strong sense of connection with the community unless we participate in it – and children’s play is one of their most fundamental ways of participating in community life. Children with disabilities are equally entitled. Their right to ‘fullest participation in the community’ is expressed in Article 23 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Article 23 recognizes that disabled children should ‘enjoy a full and decent life, in conditions that ensure dignity, promote self-reliance and facilitate the child’s active participation in the community’. (UNICEF, 1989)

Outdoor play environments are places where people of different backgrounds and ages can meet. They can provide a focus for community activity and promote social cohesion.

Social relations

We don’t really learn how social interaction works unless we ourselves have had the chance to make friends, to fall out, to try and get on with people we aren’t immediately drawn to, to sort out disagreements or experience the loss of a friendship. Environments for play have a crucial role in expanding the possibilities for play and therefore supporting children in this.

Within play, rules of conduct, behaviour and interaction come from the children themselves and are negotiated and developed at their own initiative which means that the lessons they learn are particularly deep.

What children learn in schools for example is not confined to the classroom. Captured lessons of the playground can include tolerance, the valuing of difference, and a respect for others, as well as current fads and fashions.

Contact with nature

You could read books about it or watch a video, but a sense of wonder and a connection with the planet we live on are better fostered by lying on the grass to look up at the sky, or by climbing to a hilltop, by skimming a stone on the waves or by letting an insect tickle the back of your hand.

Firsthand encounters foster children’s sense of wonder with the natural world

Many children’s experience of nature is second-hand and on a scale that can be difficult to grasp. Even those children who do not experience directly the power of the natural world are confronted with media images of disaster and destruction – earthquake, flood, tsunami. We teach them about climate change and how they must now be protected from the sun rather than enjoy it. Children can watch fantastic images of creatures in far away environments, sea creatures in the deepest part of the ocean, snow leopards on a remote mountain side, bats in subterranean caves, and yet they may not know the fascination of watching ants crossing a doorstep or birds feeding outside their window.

The beginnings of a real connection are made at a more immediate and manageable level. Watching children on a beach or in garden we see how they can experience a space and make sense of it using their whole bodies and all their senses. Children benefit from frequently spending time in even a small outdoor space where they can encounter natural cycles, rhythms of life, growth and a rich sensory environment.

The importance of the immediate environment to children is expressed in Hart (1997: 18):

We should feed children’s natural desire to contact nature’s diversity with free access to an area of limited size over an extended period of time for it is only by intimately knowing the wonders of nature’s complexity in a particular place that one can fully appreciate the immense beauty of the planet as a whole.

Physical activity

The enormous health problems being stored up by children through poor diet and lack of physical activity are waking us up to the damage done to children if they do not have adequate opportunities for outdoor play. This has been shown by research (see for example Mackett, 2004) and it is obvious to most of us watching children at play that they can burn off a lot of calories doing so. Not all children are in to sport and not all of them like organised activities (and those who do probably don’t want them all the time), but all children do want to play.

The beauty of play is tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Children’s need for time and space to play
• 2 Key stages in developing the play space
• 3 Features of enriching, inclusive play spaces
• 4 Inspiration
• 5 Involvement and collaboration
• 6 Bringing it all together
• 7 Outcomes for children and settings
• 8 Troubleshooting and sources of advice
• Bibliography
• Index