Building a State-of-the-Art Playground (for under $200!)

Awhile back, a reader left a comment on the Facebook page asking, "If I have $200 to make our playground look a little more like your schoolyard, what should I get?"

First off, $200 is a pretty good budget for a project like that, mainly because most of the coolest stuff we have in our outdoor classroom we acquired at little or no cost. 

In my course Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning (see below) we'll spend six weeks digging into every aspect of this question, and more, but in the meantime, here are some suggestions:

Sand or at least someplace for digging. Backyard sandboxes are great, but they're often really too small and too shallow for growing kids. When our community has created playgrounds, we always talk about "full body" sand pits. Sand, while not terribly expensive (around here we get about 60 lbs. for $3), could eat up that whole budget, however, but setting aside a digging area involving just regular dirt is an acceptable alternative.

And, of course, you'll need shovels, pails, and other tools. We use cheap plastic ones. We've tried metal, but galvanized steel buckets are heavier when full and tend to get bent out of shape quite easily in our rough and tumble environment. We do own some metal shovels, rakes, and hoes, but they aren't for day-to-day use even though they would probably make the work go easier. The reason is that our shovels are as often used as "weapons" as for digging, and while they both hurt, getting accidentally brained by a plastic shovel is generally preferred over being brained by a metal one.

Our two-level sandpit wouldn't be itself without a cast iron water pump. You can get a new one for under $50. Our's is mounted on a board that rests atop an inexpensive 30-gallon plastic tub that serves as our cistern. We drilled holes in the lid for the uptake pipe and for a hose to refill it when it's empty.

A natural extension of the pump, of course, are lengths of guttering. Ours are cut into 6-foot sections although we have a couple 10-footers stashed away for special uses. If you spend more than $200 on a pump set up, you've spent too much.

Using the gutters as loose parts is much preferred over a permanent installation. Not only does that allow kids to change the direction and flow of water as their needs demand, but we can use the gutters for other purposes, like down at the art station where we employ them in painting on adding machine tape with balls, mini-pumpkins, and/or toy cars and trucks.

Much of the stuff that makes our space "look" the way it does are things on which you really shouldn't have to spend anything. You can usually pick up logs and tree rounds, for instance, from a neighbor who has recently removed a tree or done some major pruning. Tree services will often give you some if they know its for kids.

Our two boats have both been donations. You just have to get the word out and wait.

It's important to remember, I think, that nothing lasts forever. It's good for kids to spend time playing on, with, and around things that are in various stages of deterioration. So when we got our new metal boat, we simply left the old, rotting, wooden one in place, where it is slowly "sinking" into the sand.

And speaking of loose parts, you shouldn't have to spend a penny on those.

Most of the toys, broken things, cartons, containers, boxes, and whatnot that we're ready to toss out, spend at least a little time in the outdoor classroom before reaching their final resting place in the dumpster.

"Loose parts" is just another name for junk.

Counted among our favorite loose parts are those larger bits that can be hoisted about by teams of kids.

Planks are incredibly versatile.

Ours range in length from 4-8 feet. These have all been donated by families and others looking to make space in their garages.

It's best if you can get new wood without a lot of knots in it: kids really like to experiment with the springy nature of the planks. Some of these have lasted us 3+ years being outdoors year round.

Shipping pallets are a great addition to planks. Ours were all acquired for free. We used to just grab them from the side of the road, but since learning that there can be some chemical and biological hazards associated with pallets, we've started making sure to only use those that are stamped with "HT," which stands for "heat treated." You don't want the chemically treated pallets around kids. We also avoid pallets that have been used to transport food products.

Old car tires are also staples around our place.

And we have a couple of galvanized steel garbage cans. They not only make great, loud, "thunder drums" and hidey-holes, but we often commander them as impromptu table tops.

Other free and inexpensive things we like to have around include brooms . . .

. . . ropes . . .

. . . pulleys . . .

. . . chains . . .

. . . roles of plastic fencing . . .

. . . pvc pipe . . .

. . . old bicycle inner tubes (in this case, we used them to make a sort of catapult) . . .

. . . pipe insulation . . .

. . . cardboard boxes . . .

. . . hoops . . .

. . . stick ponies . . .

. . . chalk . . .

. . . and lots of stuff to just bang on.

As far as more permanent things, I think it's nice to have some sort of playhouse. Again, ours was a donation from a family whose kids had outgrown it, although one of our grandfathers is building us a new one as we speak. A playhouse can be as simple as a cardboard box, however.

It's also nice to have some sturdy tables and chairs. We've purchased ours and they were quite a bit outside the $200 price range, but that's because we're a preschool with over 65 kids playing out there every day. Cheaper stuff, and even cast-off items with the legs cut down will work for backyard purposes. You can often find workable stuff at Goodwill.

And our space simply would not be what it is without a garden. Ours is just a collection of raised beds, but you don't even need that. 

Pots, soil and few seeds will suffice.

We've also re-puposed an old sensory table as a compost/worm bin. 

None of these things are expensive and that's how a child's play space should be. If there is any great truth about an outdoor classroom it's that it should be continually evolving and adapting, a hodge podge of old and new and everything in between. I am not exaggerating when I say that we acquired everything discussed in these photos for not a lot more than $200, other than the furniture and the sand, although there are work-arounds for both of those. If you're just outfitting a backyard, you can probably do it all for less.

That said, it's a backyard, which implies neighbors. As educational as these kinds of spaces are for children, these wonderlands of loose parts, dirt, rocks and compost, these bastions of junkyard chic, they are often perceived as eyesores by the uninitiated. Before going too far, you might want to save up to build a fence.

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A junkyard playground is not right for everyone, but it is ideal for the Woodland Park community. Your own playground or backyard must reflect the wider community, the geography, and the local culture. My 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning, is designed to help you figure out how to transform your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of open-ended, child-led environment that puts curiosity, self-motivation, and teamwork at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. Group discounts are available. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join us! To learn more and register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Directing Our Own Evolution Through Play

Ethologists are zoologists who study the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. They study orcas in the ocean, not Sea World. They study cheetahs on the savannah, not in the zoo. This makes sense. When we study animals in captivity most of what we learn is how that species responds to captivity. As writer and filmmaker Carol Black points out in her brilliant essay A Thousand Rivers, much of the data we collect on human learning has come from studies of children in schools, which is to say, children in captivity.

This question of "captivity" hangs over much, if not most, of the so-called science of learning. After all, virtually all of our children spend most of their lives in the captivity of schools. It's uncomfortable to think about, but it doesn't require a cynic to recognize that schools and prisons have a great deal in common. The inmates are under constant supervision by superiors who are empowered to punish them if they step too far out of line. Their daily schedules are proscribed. They spend most of their time indoors. They cannot leave or opt out or choose to do something other than what they're required to do.

We try to make ourselves feel better about it by telling ourselves the story that it's a benign captivity, one that is "for their own good," but there is no doubt that if left to their own devices, most of our children would choose to spend their time playing, preferably outdoors. In other words, they would choose the opposite of captivity, which is liberty. We all would.

From the perspective of ethology, the only way we will ever understand human learning is to study humans who are at liberty, which is to say, while at play. In my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning, we will be, in our way, becoming ethologists by exploring what it would mean to make our preschool classrooms and playgrounds into the kind of liberated places children need to learn at full capacity. (See below)

There can be no doubt that this urge to play is an adaptive trait, one that is essential to human survival. As journalist David Toomey puts it in his new book Kingdom of Play:

At present, evolutionary biologists do not know that a master gene enabled and orchestrated play, much less which master gene. Neither do they know where or when play began. They have no map, no cladogram, depicting the evolution of all animal play. But they know that play has a history stretching back hundreds of millions of years, and that its roots, that hypothetical suite of master genes, may be older still. Play has endured the formation and reformation of continents, three ice ages, and two mass extinctions. So they — and we— can be certain of one aspect of play. Whatever its adaptive advantages, they are worth the trouble. Nature takes play seriously.

Since we have, for better or worse, chosen to raise our own young in captivity, if we are to likewise take play seriously, we are best served by turning to ethologists, who, as Toomey puts it, "believe that innovative play might be a means by which an animal gains a measure of control over its own evolution."

Evolution is generally thought about in terms of random genetic mutations and law of the jungle consequences, and that obviously still plays a significant role, but it seems that the existence of play allows us to consider evolution from a new perspective. Looked at this way, we see that evolution takes place as a process of living things playing with their environment. When they learn something from their play that enhances their life — e.g., makes it easier to get food, more likely to reproduce, or simply brings joy -- they then teach what they’ve learned to others through role modeling. Over time, natural selection favors those who are best able to take advantage of this learning, so they are the individuals whose genes are the ones that are more likely to be passed along to future generations. And those are the genes, whether or not we know exactly which ones they are, that favor play.

For anyone versed in classic evolutionary theory, this is a bit mind-blowing. After all, this means that animals, through play, are capable of liberating themselves from the forces of natural selection, and to at least some degree direct them. But this kind of liberty is not possible for an animal held in captivity.

Modern school thwarts play. Indeed it often punishes play. Schooling replaces our children's natural urge to direct their own learning through play with a curriculum that determines, in advance, what they will learn, how they will learn it, and according to what schedule. As Dr. Denisha Jones, director of Defending the Early Years, tells us in our conversation about "liberation pedagogy" on Teacher Tom's Podcast, "A system that determines what you will learn kills curiosity" and curiosity is the driving force behind play. And as Denisha tells us, "Play is freedom. Play is liberation."

In the early years, many of us strive to create programs that free children to play, to provide them with a natural habitat for learning. This means that we are in the vanguard of understanding human learning. We are the "ethologists" specializing in our own species because we are among the few who live amongst free humans. There is a societal tendency to pat us on the head and patronizingly praise us for doing "such important work," but what they mean, most of the time, is that they're glad we're willing to muck around amidst the pink eye, diaper changing, and temper tantrums, so they don't have to. But this is simply evidence of how little we, as a culture, understand about learning, and it explains why they're unwilling to listen to us when we tell them about play and liberation.

It's from this perspective that we can see that it's not just our children we keep in captivity, but also ourselves. We live in a world that doesn't understand play at all, that denigrates it, that commodifies it, that relegates it to recesses, weekends, and two-weeks of paid vacations.

When I'm with liberated children, however, I find myself, for a time at least, swimming with the orcas, running with the cheetahs, and playing with the children. I'm liberated. And I know that I am in my natural habitat. 

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If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of learning environment, you might want to join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join me! To learn more and register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Fixing Your Classroom (or Playground) Design Flaws

I was recently leaving a downtown store. When I came to the exit door, I saw that it had a handle. I grabbed and pulled. The door didn't budge. I then, counter-intuitively, pushed and the door swung open. This is a prime example of a failure in design: a handle means "pull" and a push plate means "push." Indeed, every time you see a sign on a door reading "push" or "pull," you're looking at a design flaw that someone has clumsily attempted to correct.

Design flaws are all around us. My local supermarket began offering discounts to "members." To take advantage you open an app on your phone, then hold the bar code under a scanner which is located beneath the checkout screen. There is no beep, no green light, or any other indicator that your code has been read, which means that every single person who uses it winds up fuddling around, trying their phone at different angles before finally, in frustration, engaging the cashier in the following conversation:

"Did it work?"

"What work?"

"My app thingy."

"You mean your discount code?"

"Yes."

"Let me see . . . Yes, it worked."

And you thought the "Paper or plastic?" question got old.

This too, is a design flaw that a simple beep or bell or light would fix. 

Every time you see that pedestrians have worn a path through a lawn instead of sticking to the sidewalks, you're seeing evidence of design not working. My father was a transportation engineer who was fond of pointing out how design flaws were causing the traffic jams we were experiencing. He would say, "I'm sure it looked beautiful on the drafting board, but the engineer forgot to consider how actual people behave."

When I first started teaching, I set up our classroom as I would have a living room, thinking in terms of seating and "traffic flow," making sure the passageways were wide enough, that there were no places where one could get "trapped," and so forth. The reality I discovered once actual children were on the scene was that I'd created a race-track that said, quite clearly, "Run in circles," and that's what they did. After weeks of scolding the kids about running inside, I finally re-arranged the furniture and the behavior disappeared.

One of the aspects of the Reggio Emilia model for early years education that I think about often is the concept of the three teachers: 1) the adults, 2) the other children, and 3) the environment, which is where design comes in. Quite often, I've found that repeated troubling or trying behaviors have little to do with the children themselves and everything to do with an environment that forgot to consider how actual children behave. Things hanging from above tend to tell children, Jump or Swing or Hang. Long open areas say, Run. Echoey spaces say, Shout. Dark and confined says, Giggle and Whisper. Bright and busy creates a different vibe than muted and uncluttered. And design flaws are not limited to the physical space. Sometimes the aspect that needs tweaking has to do with the schedule or the expectations or even the school's philosophy, all of which I consider to be part of the children's environment as well.

This is the thinking behind my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. It's a tool to help educators, parents, and directors to think comprehensively about how your classrooms, homes, and playgrounds as a "third teacher" (see below). It's amazing how much as well-considered, adaptable, child-centric learning habitat can free you up to be the kind of educator or parent you always wanted to be.

Of course, it's not always about design flaws, but whenever I find myself forever correcting the same behavior over and over, I begin to suspect that's what it is. Instead of looking to change the child, I start by wondering how I can change the environment. It's amazing how often even a small change, like moving the furniture or replacing a handle with a push plate, can make all the difference in the world.

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If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of learning environment, you might want to join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join me! To learn more and register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!