play – Page 2 – little thoughts

park remodels and random thoughts about playgrounds

Posted on 2016-12-152016-12-15 by kristinabean

Our hometown recently updated one of the city parks in a more disability-friendly way (if you’re local, check out this article for more details!), and since it had been one of our favorite cool-weather parks last year we were excited to see how it had been transformed over the few months it was out of commission. Of course the ducks and the library were still there, so it’s hard to go very far wrong…

While none of my kids have physical disabilities right now, several of my friends have siblings or children who do, so accessibility is something I try to be aware of (although I obviously don’t have the personal experience to really evaluate whether or not something is truly accessible). It’s also something I want to encourage and seek out, so that my kids don’t grow up feeling uncomfortable and awkward around people who are physically different than them. If they grow up playing at the park with people with disabilities, it’s just going to be another permutation of normal in their minds, which is exactly how I think it should be.

(One of my favorite moments with Rondel at a park was about six months ago, at the big splash pad near our home, on a Friday morning when a group from a facility for severely disabled individuals came to enjoy the water as well. One older teenager was just sitting in the water, under the spray, splashing with his arms and laughing and laughing, a look of pure happiness on his face. Rondel watched him for a few minutes, then sat down in the water a few feet away and started doing the exact same thing. To him, there was nothing strange about seeing a “big person” acting like that – it was just another way to enjoy the park, and one he could enter into and enjoy also.)

Anyway, the new playground has a few attractions specifically geared toward children with physical issues – a zip-line that has a seat and harness instead of just a pole to hang onto, ramp accessibility on the play structure, a two-person swing, and rubber matting over a large part of the playground so wheels don’t get stuck – but it also has a lot of generally fun things for any kid to engage with: slides, ropes, ladders, a sand table/digging area, and so on. We’ve been there twice in the past couple weeks and had a great time on both occasions.

Rondel particularly appreciates the seated zip-line – he hasn’t mastered holding on to the more traditional seat, but he loves zooming back and forth:

Seriously, the kid just can’t contain his laughter every time he soars backwards on that seat!

Limerick was a bit more apprehensive of the zip line (he liked it, but at a slower pace), but he loved the sand and the ladders:

There is only one small sand area at the park (so it can easily be avoided if you don’t like the mess or if your child has sensory issues with the sand), and it only has one digging shovel – both times we went, we brought our buckets and shovels, and they were much appreciated by the other kids at the park. The other non-rubber areas have wood chips.

They also have a neat piece of equipment I hadn’t seen before: basically a series of rolling plastic tubes underneath a sort of tunnel of railings. The little kids were scooting and crawling over the rollers underneath the railings, and some of the bigger kids were holding onto the railings and “running” on the rollers with a sort of treadmill effect. Limerick went though that one over and over again:

I like the random playground equipment that, unlike ladders and slides, doesn’t have an obvious “right way” to be used; I think it facilitates open-ended play and experimentation, and it cuts down on all the parental rules for play that I notice every time I go to the park (at least at parks with attentive, hovering/engaged, middle-class white parents… the parks by our home, in much poorer neighborhoods, are far less parentally supervised).

Anyway, I think the changes at this park were for the better, and we’ll be coming back to play, feed the ducks, and maybe even do story time at the library! If any of you are local, it’d be a great place to meet up and spend a morning getting to know each other.

family life, Uncategorized

oobleck!

Posted on 2016-11-212016-11-20 by kristinabean

After discovering Bartholomew and the Oobleck, by Dr. Seuss, by sheer random luck at the library last week, and enjoying it on the basis of its story alone for several days, I told Rondel that oobleck was actually something we could make at home. I wasn’t sure if he would want to, but he spent the whole next day (while I was at work) telling my husband how he was going to get to make oobleck with Mommy, so at that point it was going to have to happen!

And happen it did:

Oobleck is, in its simplest form, a mixture of cornstarch and water. We added some food coloring to try to make it green like it is in the Dr. Seuss book, but we obviously should have added more! The proportions of the two ingredients have to be just right (approximately a 1:2 water:cornstarch ratio), but when they are, the mixture stops behaving like a liquid or a solid and becomes a non-Newtonian fluid. In other words, the way it responds is based on the force you apply. Let your hand sink down slowly into the bowl and it feels like water; try to pull your hand back out quickly and the substance instantly hardens around you. (For a good overview of the science, check out this article from Cornell).

I spent a lot of time just playing around with it on my own before I could convince the boys to touch it, but after they got over the initial weirdness of it they didn’t want to stop. Rondel in particular enjoyed the odd sensation of it and kept immersing his hands in and pulling them out again over and over and over. In fact, because our air is so dry, I had to keep adding water to the oobleck so he could keep playing with it as long as his interest held – which ended up being about an hour and a half, and would have been longer if we hadn’t desperately needed to put Limerick down for a nap.

Oobleck is definitely a messy activity. Because of the way it sticks to your skin, it’s not going to stay nicely contained in a mixing bowl! However, since it’s just cornstarch, it does hose off of everything fairly easily (much to my neighbors’ relief… the newly returned snowbirds aren’t used to the kids playing in the common area and were worried about the mess). It will also dry out your skin, so it might be good to have lotion on hand for after the clean-up. This was my first time playing with it as well, although I’ve read about it before, and I highly recommend it (and the book!) for both you and your kids!

family life, links, musings

spending time outdoors, and trying to avoid the built environment in an urban setting

Posted on 2016-03-282016-03-28 by kristinabean

I read a rather depressing article in The Guardian this week about the amount of time kids spend outside – apparently, about 3/4 of kids in the UK spend less than an hour outside on an average day, which is less than the amount of outdoors time the UN recommends for prisoners. I don’t imagine it’s that much better in the US, particularly in urban environments.

There’s been a combination of factors leading up to this, I think. We have the increased attraction of indoor activities, to start – a proliferation of games, toys, and technologies that didn’t exist a few generations ago. We have an increased sense of parental fear and anxiety, which I think stems from the globalization of our news and the breakdown of neighborhood communities. And in general we have a cultural tendency toward comfort and convenience, and being outdoors in all weathers isn’t the most comfortable or convenient thing, especially when parental supervision is required!

But it is undeniable that outdoors, active play and exploration is one of the best possible things a young child can be doing.

So, in sort of the same spirit as my efforts to make sure my kids eat a variety of healthy foods, I’ve decided to be very intentional about getting them out of the house every day for an hour or two at a time (Limerick doesn’t usually last longer than that without needing some sort of rest or snack). I wish I had more wild and natural places for them to play easily, but at least I can get them outdoors with their hands in the dirt and rocks and grass!

And in the mud! Irrigation at the botanical garden makes for a great play place for a toddler.

Our city does offer a variety of parks, and we live in a walkable area, so that helps a lot. Just this weekend, actually, we discovered a new park that has a small desert botanical garden, some walking trails, and some Native American ruins in addition to the playground area! I’m anticipating a lot more exploration there…

Rondel and I stood under this palo verde, by the flower-crowned organ pipe cacti, and held very still so we could listen to the buzzing drone of all the bees over our heads. The branches were probably a good two feet above my head and we could still hear the hum loud and clear.

Limerick learned the hard way that even the flower buds on cacti have prickles!

In a similar vein, I learned today about the concept of an urban farm preschool, where very young children who don’t live in a rural environment can still have daily exposure to the natural environment – to experience firsthand the ever-changing beauty and wildness of nature, to see how plants grow and bear fruit and die, to taste and touch and feel living things every day, to grow comfortable around dirt and animals and the unsanitized processes of the natural world. There’s another idea added to my catalog of small businesses I’d be interested in starting some day!

What are some of your favorite ways to encourage your children to play outdoors, especially those of you who live in more urban settings? How do you think our society as a whole might do a better job of enabling outdoor time for both children and adults?

family life

rondel’s tools

Posted on 2016-03-072016-03-06 by kristinabean

Rondel has discovered the power of tools and is accordingly deeply fascinated with anything that can be described as a tool in some sense or other. He’s unearthed a play tool set his uncle bought for him a couple Christmases ago and has been fixing everything in sight with them:

He also spent the whole afternoon on Monday, while I was at the doctor with Limerick, watching his dad (for whom I still don’t have a good blog name) fix his bike, and doing his best to help in the process with both his own tools and Daddy’s tools 🙂

I think the whole concept of things as tools is a good one for him, because it elevates his play from something trivial to something valuable, practical, and helpful – not that I think any of his play is trivial, or course, but the word “toy” does tend to give a thing or an activity a feeling of lesser importance. In using tools, he’s modeling what he sees in the world around him, and practicing in his own pretend world the skills he wants to copy from the adults around him. It’s just another type of play, like imaginative play, or pretend social play, or physical play, or musical play, and it’s neat to see him diving into different areas like that without prompting, and developing in different ways because of it.

The vocabulary of tools is also helpful for me when I’m teaching him how to use something safely, or having to take something away from him that’s not appropriate for him to use yet – like knives, scissors, markers, tweezers, and so on. Instead of having to just tell him he’s not allowed to use something, I can tell him that it is a tool with a specific purpose and a specific set of safety and use instructions 🙂 So some tools he can use almost anywhere, but others can only be used when Mommy is there, or can only be carried at a walk and held in a certain way. The instructions have a context then (the context of tools), so it’s easier for him to remember them and less likely that he’ll challenge them. It’s always nice to stumble upon little parenting hacks like that… 🙂

I wonder if this interest in tools is just a phase of life-discovery for him or if he’s going to be one of those boys who figures out how to take everything apart and rebuild it – he certainly would come by it naturally, with the mechanical sense that both my mom and my husband have! I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see.

family life

a boy and his trains (Grandma’s trains, that is…)

Posted on 2015-12-082015-12-07 by kristinabean

Sometimes I wish I had a window into Rondel’s mind, to know what he’s thinking and imagining as he plays.

He is currently absorbed by trains of all types, having been introduced to them at our local children’s museum, and then having discovered that Grandma had a box of trains saved from my childhood. He’ll spend a small amount of time setting up the track, not worrying about whether it is intricate or even complete, as long as there is something to drive the train on, and then spend the rest of his time lining up the trains, linking them together with their magnetic hooks, pushing them slowly back and forth on the little piece of track right in front of him.

Nothing disturbs his focus. (Not even Grandma!)

He is completely in another world, a world perhaps where giant powerful steam engines chug fiercely down the rails, where light rail trains glide smoothly down the road next to the comparatively tiny cars, where people flock on and off the passenger cars as the trains pull up to the station. Or perhaps he is lost in the details, feeling the rough unfinished tracks and the smooth painted engines, the perfect curves of the wheels or the straight lines of the cars, imagining the freight carried in each crate or channel or bucket, taking pleasure in the effortless connection of one magnet to another, feeling the heft of the train as one engine pulls a whole line of cars behind it down the track. There’s no real way for me to know what captivates him so deeply about the trains.

And he doesn’t play with them the way I remember playing with them. My favorite part of the trains (at least as far as I remember, when I was quite a bit older than Rondel is now) was designing the track, seeing what new configuration I could build with the pieces, creating different loops and tunnels for the trains to traverse.

But even though I don’t fully understand the way Rondel plays, I see his thoughtful and imaginative side, his attention to details, and his love of patterns, connections, and categorizations; I see his joy and excitement about doing something he loves; and I see him playing in a way that allows his mind to develop in its own unique bent, free of the artificial goals and constraints of an adult’s idea of fun or the “proper” way to play. All his senses are involved, his body is unconstrained (as evidenced by how he’s lying on his side to push the trains at eye level…), his imagination is free, his attention is undistracted, and his decisions are internally motivated.

In these moments, I feel like I’m privileged to observe the beauty of self-directed, spontaneous, childhood play, and I’m so glad that my son has the opportunity to experience life and develop in that context. We’re far from perfect, but days like these bring me so much happiness.