Almost the whole philosophy of this Scottish trip and seeing the kids, you know, experiencing nature and the seasons and rain and mud and different temperatures, that that’s the good stuff. That’s the stuff that we want for children. It is good for us. This research shows that being in nature for even like 20 minutes at a time has tremendous benefits on our bodies, our minds, our hearts.
Our nervous systems.
Hi, this is Rusty Keeler and you’re listening to the Play Nature Podcast where we talk about play nature, playing in nature, and the nature of play. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s have a listen.
Hello. Welcome back to the Play Nature Podcast. All right. I’m glad you’re joining me today. And that sound besides my voice isn’t static. We’re not having AV issues. That’s the creek. I am back next to Six Mile Creek here, and we’ve had rains. We’re in springtime, which in Ithaca, New York is the back and forth between beautiful, warm, yay, and then suddenly 20 degrees Fahrenheit and cold and freezing and back and forth.
But that’s okay. That’s what spring here is all about. The kind of that transition between, you know, between seasons. But it’s interesting, like before the full blast of flowers and green and you know, things just growing, there’s this pause and then it’s subtle. It’s subtle changes. What are the changes?
What are the subtle or not subtle changes of spring where you are? Or maybe you’re going into autumn, if you’re on the south side of our planet. Yeah. Yeah. Here it’s interesting because it’s like, oh, birds, it’s like a sound change, like before the flowers come up, but the birds are back from their migratory journeys down south, and so that’s, that’s a great, it’s like you’re just surrounded by the sounds of, of the.
Of the birds of all different kinds. You start to, you know, I keep track of all these little changes. The first time we of course see a robin, but then we have Ospreys that fish around the creeks and lakes around here. So to see the first Osprey come back is fun. And then the sounds of the creek because it’s been raining.
So we like tune in to all these things and that puts us in our place. Right. And we. Also, we’re in transition of in different times a year. So as we think about putting children in natural spaces or bringing nature to children, or bringing children to nature, it’s because we want them to connect with the earth and connect with the seasons, and connect with the cycles of life, and we wanna connect with that too.
So it’s nice to be able to do that. Are you doing that? Do you have a sit spot, a place where you can go and just bathe in the forest or in a park or a beach or your backyard and just kind of notice this episode is gonna be about. My Scotland trip. Yay. Visiting Outdoor Nature preschools in the Highlands of Scotland.
But one of the great things was that the whole trip ended on the symposium and there was this amazing researcher that talked about the benefits of children in nature and all of us in nature. And, you know, we were, we evolved in nature, right? We, we are in tune with it. And so I wanna get her on this podcast in the future here, but just, just think about that idea and that’s almost the whole philosophy of this Scottish trip and seeing the kids, you know, experiencing nature and the seasons and rain and mud and different temperatures.
And this is what you and I believe that that’s the good stuff. That’s the stuff that we want for children, we want for, for all of us. Like it is good for us. This research shows that being in nature for even like 30 minutes at, you know, at a time, 20 minutes at a time, has tremendous benefits on our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our nervous system.
Yes. Ah, so maybe even wherever you are listening to this podcast, maybe you can, your nervous system can tune into the Six Mile Creek that I’m sitting next to as I tune into it too. Yeah, so it’s been a few weeks since I was in Scotland, and now Ithaca, New York is caught up to where Scotland was in, in springtime and, and this study tour.
You may have heard me. Talking about it, or maybe you were on my newsletter list and you, you get the newsletters that was kind of getting all excited about it. And so this was a about a year long planning in the making to help lead a study tour of Scottish outdoor preschools and the Masterminds behind it were the team at Stash.
And Cameron Sprague, a buddy of mine lives in Scotland. Uh, he approached me about a year ago and was like, Hey, do you wanna, do you wanna help lead a bus tour of our preschools? And I’m like, yes, of course. Just like that, you know, that’s up my alley, just like it’s up your alley. So, yeah. So. I want to, I’m gonna tell you all some of the ins and outs of it and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll take you a little, uh, a audio visual, maybe not a visual, but you have, you have to supply the visual, uh, an audio tour of, of the trip.
But the, the idea was that they have these preschools. Stash is the company. You can look them up and put it in the show notes, str ash.org, and it’s some Scottish word. I never quite understand it. It’s kind of like a, a big hoopla, or maybe it’s a str ash. It’s like a adventure and something exciting and not quite chaos.
Maybe it has to do with rugby. I don’t know. But anyway, it’s kind of a fun name. And they have a series of these outdoor nursery schools, um, where the children are outdoors all day long. Um, because they believe in the stuff that we believe in, that children should be connected to the earth and nature and seasons and each other, and, and mud.
And they know how good it is and they know that, you know, the academic stuff will come, it will come in the future. Uh, but that. That kind of connecting with each other and connecting with nature and asking questions and having fun and, you know, having adventures that don’t go right or that they have, you have to, you know, be resilient or you have to, you know, you problem solve or you fail or you get up.
That those are the things that are the foundation for being human. They’re the foundation for living. They’re the foundation for academics when they come in the future. So that’s what these preschools are all about, is just, you know, it’s like all those four school things that we like children being out in it, exploring and experiencing.
So the trip was, it was like a five day bus tour through the Highlands. Uh, we started in Glasgow and there were about 30 participants. And we had a big old modern bus that took us around with a great bus driver. Uh, and so we had people from seven countries checking it all out from LA Lost from Los Angeles to Lithuania.
That was our slogan. And we had early childhood educators, we had college professors, we had infant toddler. Professionals. We had teacher trainers, we had, uh, evolutionary biologists, we had play advocates and everything in between. And it was a great bunch. Right? You know, it, it, this is our crew, our community.
And you, you know, you would’ve been a great addition to this, uh, to this group because it really is, it feels like, it’s like, oh, these are our people. The people that care. You know, we’re not alone in this. Um, we’re surrounded by people that care about this. So that alone made the trip great, right?
Everybody that was there from Iceland to Lithuania, to Arizona, to Ithaca, New York, um, we’re neat people that we had great conversations and we were learning together and being wowed together. Stash themselves. It totally outdid themselves. The planning was incredible. The thing flowed, the tour flowed like magic.
The restaurants picked out for lunches and dinners and all the hotels, everything’s taken care of. We had walks, we had stops in the mountains, stops by the sea. Um, everything was just timed so well. I was just amazed by everything. So it really flowed well. And it flowed so well that they’re planning the next two years of it.
So there’s a wait list already. You wanna, you wanna get on that wait list? Yeah. Uh, we’ll have that in the show notes. So, yeah, why don’t, why don’t you join me next year and the next two years we’re gonna have special guests. We’ll announce later. We’ll announce soon. But, uh, other special guests that you’d love to spend a week, spend a week with looking at nature preschools.
Um, but anyway, so we took off on the bus, started in Glosgow and you know, some warmup greetings, a champagne, what do they call that? Getting to know each other. Mixers, some fun stuff just to kind of, you know. Start to meet everybody. And then the next morning we were off onto the bus and we headed northwest to open, which is like has a harbor and leads to the sea and whether you can get to the islands off of Scotland.
And so that was the first site of this. So I just want to kind of, we’ll just, I’ll take you through some of these, but, so like right away you’re like, oh, mud. Like this was a mud season, right? And it was raining. And this was the thing too that, that stash had planned so well, like everybody participating, we got a goodie bag, gift bag of stuff, including totally solid, well-made rain pants.
So everybody had rain pants. They said we should all bring raincoats and lots of layers. But so they had these great rain pants that all their. The adult educators, people out there with kids every day. These are the rain pants that they wear. And then winter hats, you know, uh, so we were well equipped, you know, no bad weather, just bad clothing.
So we had good clothing and so we dawned our clothing and we split into two different groups. And, um, this first site had like a hillside mountainous. You know, muddy tree climbing area where kids are in the woods and all these different levels and constructions and, um, they’re by the sea. So they, they were like big fishing nets that they had strung between trees and, um, just so great.
Just, you know, what you imagine and at like wild free ranging kids. It’s all fenced in, you know, but you can’t, you’re not really even aware of the fences. Um, so you’re climbing up all this stuff and then they do have little buildings. So if it, if the weather is so bad, you can be inside and in the deep, dark, cold winter, you know, really bad weather, you know, Cameron will say, Hey, we’re not trying to, nobody really has to suffer here.
You know, if, if you wanna spend all day in the, in the cabin with a wood stove. And it’s like a classroom in there. You know, you can eat lunch in there. You could, you know, there’s activities and stuff you can spend the whole day in there. That’s okay. You can make those choices. It’s not to like force kids to be out all, all day, but most kids are out all day.
They had, so they had buildings that were classrooms, they had buildings where you could take little naps, pretty rustic buildings. Uh, and then they had, you know, the bathrooms they do, uh, composting toilets. That’s what I saw, I think on all the sites, composting toilets, and good hand wash stations, and that’s how they took care of it.
So that was interesting to see, like, this is up and running. This is functioning, this is how they do it. So this first site had the mountains and the hills, you know. Hills that you’re climbing and hill slides going down and real rugged. I mean, this is, it’s, it’s woodsy and you can tell it is kid eroded, right?
Kids all over this thing. And then they had another site, uh, that was like the open meadow that wasn’t really developed too much, or they’re just in the beginnings of developing it. Because the first, they just had the hill and they used to have, this is interesting story. They used to have a tree, a climbing tree that they would.
Come down off the mountain, off the hill and they walk through a meadow had to be like a sheep meadow, and they would walk through it and get to the climbing tree. And they did that for years. Uh, ’cause it was just like a perfect tree in the way the branches were and everything. So they would climb in there, great for preschoolers.
Uh, but then one year the tree fell over. All the climbing tree fell over. And of course that was a shock at first. But then they realized, hey. The way this thing fell over. It’s actually, uh, a, a great climbing tree in its own right. Like it’s, it’s totally interesting the way the branches are and the way that you can climb it and scale it and traverse it, and they hang, ropes, swings in it and all sorts of stuff.
So now they have the, it tipped over and the, the landowner let them take over that meadow. So they have the two sites, the mountainous site, and then the meadow site. And the Meadow site has, you know, places to eat and there’s big sand pits and great mud kitchens and real rugged. Uh, and they have willow living.
Willow, you know, I love living willow, living willow tunnels and living willow willow arches and living willow huts or even the great living willow cathedrals. Yeah, well they got it going over there. It’s willow. Maybe, maybe Willow was born Prehistorically in Scotland. ’cause it is everywhere and it’s, it’s everywhere in all these preschools.
So you could see where they planted it years and years ago and it’s grown in and now they’re trimming it and they’re, uh, using the willow whips to make new fences and new arches and new huts. And, and I was just, you know, thrilled. I took tons of pictures of, you know, all these great, uh, willow structures and experiments.
So that’s super fun. So I love seeing, you know, the terrain and the teachers and how they weave into it and what they’ve built and what they’re experimenting with. But then it’s also beautiful to see the children. The children just feel feeling so free. They’re all in their mud suits, and you could, you could just see like this was their place.
Like it, it was a place of freedom. This was their place. And each, each place we went to, I just got this sense like there was such a, for them a feeling of belonging. A sense of belonging. Like this was their place and they could do what they wanted. And the adults are on the outside helping, helping things out, reminding them, okay, lunch, this the last, you know, the last group doing lunch, come on over kind of thing.
Helping with hand wash stations and whatnot, but that they just, this was, they owned it, the kids owned it. And so that, that’s great to see. And, and what is that, you know, it could be the place, but it really could be the philosophy of the adult. Like are you saying yes? Is this a philosophy of Yes. Can the kids feel.
It. And so I think these places, they, they just feel like, yeah, this is made for us and we can explore and experiment and there’s loose materials and nothing’s too precious, so we can feel free. The next stop on our tour was Fort William. Now I’m not a, a big Harry Potter fanatic or anything, but I guess Fort Williams, one of the places where they.
Where they filmed some of the Harry Potter movies, and we did get to go see, I mean, all these scenes and all these, uh, landscapes were just incredible, real breathtaking places. And one of them is where they, there’s like a big, uh, a train goes on this viaduct, you know, arched viaduct through this valley.
And so I guess that’s a famous scene. And so we saw it and it was beautiful nestled in these mountains with a lake. Excuse me, A lock, they call it Lakes Locks over there. So anyway, so Fort William, uh, yeah, so that’s like, I guess, uh, you know, I, I guess I think of Fort William almost as like the Durango, Colorado of Scotland.
Like it’s a kind of a cool, funky town and it is like the gateway to like, for hikers and mountain bikers and, you know, people going up to explore. In the mountains and things, there were still snow caps on those things. So there was this spirit of like, outdoors, right? The outdoors is a place to be as an adult and as a kid.
And you know, even Scotland in general, I felt like, had that philosophy and with their early childhood education, like, and, and play, like supporting play. Uh, this was impressive At a national level, like national government and the regional governments are really standing up and standing behind play. You know, they take the child’s right to play seriously, you know, the UN convention of the child, the rights of the child, and the right to play.
And so they even use that in their laws and what they are supporting in schools and early childhood education. And they stand up for early childhood education. The government pays for early childhood education. They fund early childhood education. They fund providers and so families will get basically almost free c childcare for qualifying two year olds, and then almost nearly universal, three to five year olds, and you get essentially 30 hours a week.
Free childcare. You can look up the details, but there’s not like qualifications. It’s like kind of across the board and then this is how centers are funded. It takes a burden off the parents and there’s private ones that don’t get government funding, but for the most part, providers are getting. Getting funding for the government.
And so that’s pretty amazing. And then pretty amazing to see a, a group like Ash taking it and running with it in the direction of free play and nature play outdoors. So Fort William was the site that Cameron, Cameron Sprague, uh, was the director of, now he’s a co-director of the whole organization. Um, but he used to be director of this one site.
Fort William and when he started it was a field and that was it. Like two trees, I don’t know, two acres, three acres and two trees. Um, but he had the spirit just like us, of wanting to connect kids to nature and had them, have them connected to trees and plants and sand and mud and water and seasons, all the good stuff.
So, uh, he just started planting and designing and building and pallets. He’s like a pallet master and so they’ve built all sorts of things. I think it’s been about 10 years now. Um, the great Juliet Robertson, who inspired the country and the world of with nature play and connecting kids to nature, uh, who passed away this year was a mentor of his, and she called this place.
Cameron’s field of dreams and so I’ve been seeing pictures of these places for this place for years and years. So I felt like it was a pilgrimage to get to go see it in person and it did not, we say, uh, it was awesome, basically. Yeah, so just to see like all this planting going on and they plant like shrub, not just shrubs, but like trees as shrub lines.
So there’s all these meandering like trees planted very close together in fun shapes to create borders and rooms of different areas. Of course, there’s willow huts, gare and willow tunnels, and willow arches here and there. Mud kitchens again like these. Uh, rustic cas with wood stoves inside, keeping things warm.
If you wanna go in and warm up, there’s a tower, like a another pallet made scrap, lumber made tower that is risky. And this is a whole other conversation. Maybe we’ll get Cameron on here again to really take us through their philosophy of risk, but it’s different. It’s, I think it’s different than what we think of in nor North America because they like, from the government level and the standards level, there’s benefits of risk and there’s even these guidelines.
I don’t know that iso, you know, ISO and these numbers. I’m not good at remembering all of numbers, but I, we will get those to you too sometime in the show notes. Uh. Basically they’re guidelines for like, here’s how you do risk, here’s why you should do risk. Here’s why you should not take risk out. Ooh, thunder.
Hear that? Okay. It’s not raining, but I hear thunder. Speaking of risk, uh, but that’s okay. I’m, I’m under some trees. Uh, so anyway, this idea of risk, and they talked about graduated risk, so that every time they build something out of these pallets, there’s like, oh, it’s a, a little challenge to get up on top of this pallet cube or this pallet a-frame.
Here’s the easy way. Oh, here’s the little challenging way, and then here’s the really challenging way that you might not want to try unless you’re really good. And so they’ve built some contraptions that, you know, I tend to think when I go on these tours will I see anything that surprises me, anything I haven’t seen before.
So yes, I saw some things I hadn’t seen before, and one was this tower, uh, that they really finished kind of after we left, but we saw them working on it as a tower over a bridge that’d been working for Wow. You know, a few years just as a bridge and they made this tower and they want to have this graduated risk so that if you’re really ready, you know, at some point some kids are really ready to take the next level of risk.
And so here it was, you can really climb up this thing and no fall zone. You could fall on things. I mean, basically it’s dangerous. But if their philosophy, and this seems like the Scottish philosophy is, you know, if you’re not ready for it, don’t do it. But if you’re ready for it, well here you go. Let’s see a try and we’ll have support.
We’ll be people around you. But it’s just like, you know, a lot of, a lot of our listeners here, our community has the philosophy of like, say kids climbing trees, like, or even on equipment. Like we’re not gonna put you up in it. ’cause you gotta be able to get in it, right? To show that you’re like capable and then you can climb around.
And so that’s sort of the idea with this. Like, they’re gonna make it hard enough that if you’re going to, if you, if you want to get to the top of that, you gotta be really good. You gotta be really ready. And maybe you’re not a hundred percent confident, but you gotta really like it. It takes agility to get to it.
And then there idea is that once you’re up there, then you’re gonna be able to get yourself down and stuff. Ooh, some more thunder.
And so that, that idea is kind of like a tree, you know, first when you, when you see it as like a rickety, cool funky tower over a wooden bridge, um, you think, my gosh, what? They’re not following playground safety guidelines. But then turns out they are, they’re following the playground benefit risk standards.
And then it’s like, oh, well that is like climbing a tree. Like really, you feel if the child feels good enough to get into it, they can climb it. You feel good enough to get up top and there’s things to look out for and you can coach from down below, but it does get a little nerve wracking for the adult.
Whoa, they’re really up there high. Well, and for the kid, whoa, I’m really up here high. And then you have to be pro good problem solver. Like, okay, what are the right branches? What are the right things to grip? What are the ones that’ll break on me? Same with a rickety pallet tower. What are the right things to grip a hold of?
All right, so that, that was Fort William, the pilgrimage we went to, let’s see, the next one was. To grain. Yeah. I’m not pronouncing these things right to grain. That was that for a Scottish accident. Let’s see, so this was interesting because it was like a planned community. Picture yourself in a Scottish planned community that was all like tidy, like it looked like an old village of the architecture styles of the housing and everything, but, but it was all brand new.
Very tidy. Sort of like Truman show except Scottish version. And there’s a little store in a little doctor’s office and a little cafe and um, and there’s a community garden and there is a funky wild nature preschool right there as part of it. And it has its building. It was kind of, they inhabited this prebuilt building that was.
Uh, you know, designed in the style of the tiny little village. But from there they have again, like a hillside, like a rugged hillside. And it’s the kind of place that, you know, if you’re thinking, oh, should we have a preschool there? You might think we couldn’t have a preschool playground there. It’s just a forested hill, steep hill.
But then if you like, refocus your brain. You think, oh, actually that is a great place to have a preschool playground. It’s a forested hill. And so of course, like, again, it’s like kid erosion, all these different levels, plateaus. Uh, they, you know, a few little built things here and there up at the top of the hill once you get to the top.
Now it’s pouring right now, but I got my rain suit. No bad weather, just bad clothing, right? Am I right? Yeah. So anyway, yeah. So they had this little observatory hut at the top where you could look out over the, over the fence line and beyond, and they had like bird feeders right outside there. Uh, so you could look.
And then what I loved was seeing all these trees that kids had gotten into almost ground level, like where the, because the, it’s a slope, and then trees would branch out and multiple branches right from the trunk, and it was just like worn away. Like, I love that when you see like a sculpture in public places and you just see like it’s worn where the people touch it over and over.
Like you’ll see like bronze sculptures with like the nose because people rub the nose. Uh, so these trees were like gently rubbed for years by the kids. So yeah, I love seeing that. Okay. It’s really pouring now. Let’s see. They also had, so then you, it was kind of fun to have this rugged hillside play game.
And then you walked through the tiny little village, then you get to the woods and they had like, they’d be out, they’d take half the group out, um, certain days of the week and just be in the woods. And this was kind of neat, their technique for being in the woods. And this, this wasn’t what they owned, but it was, part of it was like a community park, a woods, and maybe you could do something like this.
All the kids had bright, you know, fluorescent pennies, you know, pullovers, so you could see them in the woods. And then they had set up like in the four directions, another bright fluorescent, uh, pullover that was just kind of tucked on a tree, hung on a tree branch. And so they went over it with the kids like, okay, here’s your perimeter, here’s, here’s where we’re gonna be today.
You know, they can mix it up. And then they were playing hide and seek when we were there. We got to be part of that. That was fun. Kids know these woods. They’re up over rocks and on logs and you know, this is their territory. And then they had a portable porta potty. So it was like this little pop-up tent, poof, pops up and inside they have a, now I’ve seen this before, called a Luggable Lu, um, basically a bucket and there’s sawdust and there’s.
What else did they put in there? Something to make it smell nice. So anyway, it was, yeah, so they, they have this little porter thing, so you use it and then they clean it up at the end and it’s in a bag. There’s like a bag liner, garbage bag liner in the five gallon bucket and there’s little seed on it so you can sit and do your business.
And they say everybody likes doing their business in that thing. I mean, why wouldn’t you? Right. That’s fun. Okay, moving on. Higher up. O on the sea, uh, Elgin. Now this is a windy space. Uh, so this one was wide open and I actually didn’t get to spend much time in the play area because I got to lead two tours up through the woods, these magical woods.
And I did like a, a meditative silent sensory walk to kind of tune to the woods tune. To the land. And then up top, we had some, we gathered in a circle, we talked about it, and, and then we did ferry hunt building. Yeah. So, but this magical place with thunder and lightning. Ooh.
But it got me thinking like when we, you know, we’re so busy with things and technology is beaming at us and there’s so much information coming at us. It is really nice to like stop all that and almost like detune from that and tune to the earth. Whew. Take some deep breaths and be in nature and you see the natural world and then you remember that you are part of the natural world and I’m, I’ve been thinking a lot about technology and the engulfment.
Of technology that we were being engulfed in our cars and our devices and how much more technology is coming at US and ai, and it’s like everything wants more and more and more. And it made me really appreciate the idea of like, how about we pull, we can pull away, we can take time to pull away and be engulfed in nature.
That is a healthy engulfment. So. We love that for us and we love that for our kids. Uh, from there we went to a, one of the next days, uh, well we stayed in a hotel that was Charlie Chaplin’s favorite place to bring his, it was like this ma old mansion, but his, to bring his family when they wanted to get away from it all.
But anyway, that was, uh, on the way home to Glasgow. Um, we stopped at a non ash place called Faso. Faso play and, okay folks. Dear listener, here’s one of those ones that, uh, was something I had never seen before. They don’t call it this, but it was basically a swamp play Skate, play, skate. Yes. Yeah. Now, okay.
We had gotten there after a big rain. It wasn’t raining when we were there, but I guess they had a rain all morning, so it was really, really wet, but it’s almost always really, really wet. This was like a behind the farm, behind the landowner’s house, and they had like a tree area and it was, it was swampy and they had boardwalks that went everywhere.
Tree houses and bridges. Bridges over this little creek, bridges over that little creek bridge over this wet area. And they have the smell of a swamp, and there are the kids in their mud suits, their rain suits, their snow suits totally fine, you know, in puddles, out of puddles over bridges. And then going into the yurt, the heated wood fired yurt to warm up.
But it was one of those moments I was like, what am I seeing swamp? Swamp place game. And so it, it, it puts things in perspective, right? Like, do we worry about having a puddle after a rain? Do we worry about having puddles on blacktop? Do we worry about standing water? What do we worry about? What do we worry about?
Here’s a school that follows their guidelines Is, is regulated by the government, you know has they have strict health and safety and licensing and all that protocols and they have boardwalk over wet, soggy, swampy land. And that’s where they’re playing. And it’s awesome and the kids are thriving and there’s amazing things going on, and they have a pet pheasant.
You know, I’m all about the free range chickens with kids in place games, but then free range pheasants again. Never saw that before. And then I got to, you know, I don’t wanna make this too long here, but probably, you know, I love this from Ash stuff, of course. And I wanna keep, I wanna keep going back. And it was great to make the pilgrimages, especially to see Cameron’s work.
Uh, Fort William. Loved all the directors. I loved, you know, seeing them interact. I love seeing all the kids. And also like they have the, the co-leader, co-director, and this fellow Josh with Cameron, he’s like the, he comes at it from the accounting, so he’s like an accountant, um, to help make everything work and run.
And yet he is like the most playful. Person, accountant you’ve ever, you’ve ever known, and all the kids instantly gravitated to him every, every place. We stopped and, and just saw that like, and just like all of us, like, just like you, you’re, you’re using your super, your super strength to support play, to support children, right?
Whatever it is, whatever your super skills are, you’re putting it to good use. And so it was great to see Josh, the accountant, putting his super skills. His right superpowers to use to support play. So that was Stramash. But then back in Glasgow when we got back, one of the last days, another pilgrimage for me.
I got to see, uh, the, an adventure playground, like a real deal adventure playground. The Baltic Baltic Street Adventure Playground, right smack in a neighborhood in Glasgow. Yeah, and this was like, you know, for me it’s like this, I don’t even know how to describe this. It’s like a dream come true scene.
Like these, a real adventure playground where it is a, it’s that sense of place for kids. It’s a place they can go. It’s a place where they belong. It’s a place that they build. It’s a place of risk, it’s a place of mess. It is a place. That is of the children, by the children, for the children with incredible dedicated play workers around the outside making the whole thing work, like the real deal.
And so we all, you know, the bus pulled up and we all get out and there’s kids after school, you know, a group of, of you know, rough and tumble guys and girls like eating their hamburgers. Right. Eating their, they get meals and that’s part of it too. So it’s like boom, right in the neighborhood after school, you go here and it is free, play free, whatever.
You can build, you can hang out, you can goof around. There’s animals to tend and they, one of the big parts is they have a commercial kitchen, so they are feeding the kids like, this is a place that you belong. You’re a kid, you belong here. There and there’s hills and there’s tires and there’s weird kid built sculpture and there’s tree houses and there’s risk and there’s mess, and there’s, you know, all that, all that incredible great stuff they love so much.
But it was really this idea of a place where kids can go and be outdoors and be with each other and be with the plate workers who support them and love them and are, and are there for them. And to me. I feel like, you know, childhood has changed so much. This’ll be another podcast because, you know, maybe it’s, I’m coming to grips with it, you know, I don’t like to admit that it, that it has happened, but it has changed so much.
And with children in indoors, or children scheduled, or children not having safe, safe streets and being either overprotected, overscheduled, academics, too much depression, anxiety, you know, blah, all this stuff. I feel like the places like the Baltic Street Adventure Playground in Glasgow, it’s like the answer to our problems.
Play workers are the answer to our problems. Having adults like you who believe in play, who stand for play, who stand up for play, professionals who create the time, the space, and the material. For play, whether it’s a dedicated adventure, playgrounds to get kids outside here is a safe place. Parents, they can come here, they can come here and gather after school, they’ll get fed.
There’s adults that are responsible and they can be there like get kids together. Get kids out, and that, or having the play worker model where they are play ranging. Where they’re in parks, where they’re in neighborhoods. There’s not a dedicated space. They have a van Spiel mobile in Germany, the play mobile where they’re out play workers are out there and parents can feel comfortable like, okay, well let our kids out because they’re these adults that we trust, that are trained, that are professionals and those, that’s those same professionals.
We can do the same sort of play work training at schools in Scotland and in the uk. There’s Opal, OPAL. Look that up. Opal Play Outdoor play and learning stands for. And so at recess there’s play workers and play work principles and all these principles of the nature preschools, the outdoor preschools, and the adventure playground.
It is adults like you, like me, who believe that this is what children need. This is what children deserve. All children, right? All children like need to touch this. And whether you can have a full-blown adventure playground where you can have a full-blown, uh, outdoor preschool, you know, maybe, maybe you’re lucky that you can go in that direction, but we can all start to step in that direction, whether you, whether you have the full, full blown thing, you have your own mountain and wood wooded hill with trees, maybe, maybe not, but you can start to take small steps and say, Hey, we.
They, we wanna be outside more. Oh, is it raining? Let’s go outside in the rain. If you have an all manmade area, rubber surfacing and play equipment, let’s go out there in the rain. There’s nature. You don’t have any nature in your yard. You say, well, when it rains, you do. So go out there in the rain, dig up some asphalt, and have just an area that forms a puddle or that makes some mud, or have a corner that starts to plant there.
Things, plant a whole bunch of trees. Plant one tree, plant an orchard, or just plant sunflowers or just plant beans, or, I don’t know what. Just bring in hay bales, bring in logs, bring in stumps. Start to make an outdoor preschool corner start to have play work, a philosophy at your school where you’re like, oh, I am gonna support the play and intervene less and to let play happen.
Or I’m gonna have things that have graduated risk. So there are easy things with your play equipment, but there’s some things that are more difficult and maybe if you want to add even extra, the highest graduated risk, you let kids climb on the outside of the play equipment. Ah, when they’re ready. ’cause at some point they’ll be ready.
So there you have it. There was a Scottish trip. It was fun. It was eye open. I got to do it with my older son, 14-year-old son, JJ Julian James. And then we got to go see a 900 year old cathedral and go explore a castle after the tour was up and have that kind of fun sight scene, uh, you know, time together in the old country, but really quite a trip and so much to be inspired by.
And. I’m excited that they’re gonna keep planning these and maybe you can join us on one of these trips in the future, but I’ll keep showing pictures. I’ll get some pictures going at some point that you can look at. Check it out. I’ll have some more Scottish people on the podcast. And yeah, it’s, it’s very encouraging to see people leading the way and, hey, we don’t have to.
Invent it. We don’t have to reinvent it. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We don’t have to reinvent the outdoor preschool. We don’t have to reinvent the adventure playground. There’s models for us. There’s people that are leading the way, and then we can just use it for our circumstances. We mold it, we switch it around.
We make it work for our licensing, for our rules, for our school district, for our parks, for our own backyards. Yeah. So let’s do it. Oh, wait. We are doing it. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for doing what you do and I’ll keep doing what I do and let’s keep our community going. Reach out to me if you have questions or comments, and I’d love to hear from you.
Until next time. See ya.
All right. Thanks for listening. Do you have a comment or a question? Email me at Play Nature podcast@gmail.com. You know, I like talking about this stuff and maybe we could use your question on a future podcast episode. As always, I have some free goodies for you in the show notes, including my outdoor loose parts guide, fun stuff in there.
And so I wish you the best in your outdoor play adventures, and when it comes to adding nature to your yard or loose parts or saying yes to risky play, my favorite motto is dream big, start small. And never stop. Oh yeah. Woo, woo, woo. Let’s do it. All right. Have fun out there.
