All right. Hello again. Rusty Keeler here, and I’m glad you’re here. Thanks for joining me in a Play Nature Podcast, episode three. All right, we’re moving along now. Yeah, and today’s podcast is going to be about natural play scapes. Natural play scapes. You know, kind of my three big pillars here are nature play, natural play scapes, risky play, and loose parts play.
That’s kind of the, the foundation here, kind of the different directions that we’ll go. But today is about natural play, scapes, landscapes for play and what they are, how to build them. How to do some projects, how to talk to licensing about it, and yeah, what are the benefits what are natural place scapes?
We’re gonna go deep into that direction. And at the end I will, read off and give you a few quick projects, quick natural place skate projects that you can try simply in your own backyard play space. And then I’ll answer three questions. From you. So at the very end I’ll an answer the question of desert natural play scapes.
What types of storage sheds are good for natural play scapes and then licensing and rocks. Yeah, we’ll get into that at the end, but first, natural play scapes. What are natural play scapes? Here’s what natural play scapes aren’t kind of standard. Picture a playground with monkey bars and swings, and a big piece of fixed play equipment and rubber surfacing.
That’s not a natural play scape. This idea of landscape for play is where the playscape is. Yeah, a landscape. Is a living environment. Instead of being filled with fixed equipment, it could still have some pieces of fixed equipment, but it’s also filled with natural stuff like hills and trees and sand and water and mud and rocks.
And gardens and herbs and mess and loose parts and logs. The list goes on and on. Yeah, and I’ll say some of my very favorite natural play spaces, playgrounds in general don’t even have any play equipment, you know, and it’s okay if you’ve got play equipment. That’s fine. We can keep naturalizing, we can think about how we can naturalize the corners and the little spaces around it.
But a lot of places are doing amazing things with natural spaces and having no equipment at all, and they’re rich, diverse, endless possibilities for play and learning and development. And in many ways, those kind of environments are more homelike, more like a backyard. It may be like your backyard. And I work with a lot of childcare centers, you know, schools, parks two, but a lot of childcare centers.
And I’ve done work with family, childcare, home-based childcare. And in a way they have it best of all, because they are already home-like feeling right. It’s homey. It’s a backyard. And it might have a storage shed, it might have gardens, it might have grass already. You know, some of those big centers where there’s dozens of children or hundreds of children, you know, they’re doing their best to try to make a homey backyard feeling.
So that’s kind of what natural place spaces are all about. Thinking about, okay, well, how can we bring in natural materials that make it feel like a nature area, like a backyard? You know, really I’m interested in, you know, places that are different. Every, like, every play space should be different depending on where it is.
Is it in the desert? Is it by a beach? Is it in the mountains? Is it up north in the cold or is it in the tropics? And what are the materials? Is it wild boulders in Alaska, or is it beachy sand? Play spaces in Key West in Florida. Yeah, I feel like a natural play scape. All play scapes should be a reflection for children of the place where they live.
And I think that’s some of the beauty of a natural play scape. I want to myself and inspire you to create outdoor spaces that are real, that connect children to the earth, to the real stuff. Because that’s the beautiful, that’s the beautiful stuff. It’s like humans connecting to nature. We are nature and children know that.
And maybe it’s easier for them, you know, to have that connection to nature. And I wanna put children in the cycles of the seasons so that you feel it, you live it, you know, to really be in spring. Now here in Ithaca, New York, we’re getting excited because winter is shifting into spring and so everything’s different and it feels different.
And so I love the idea of a living play scape, a living environment for children where they can experience that too. The essence of the seasons, it’s one thing to read about Spring in a book or play a spring game in an app on an iPad. Or watch a movie about spring and it’s a whole different deal when suddenly your outdoor play space, your outdoor classroom is bursting into blossoms from the apple trees or the cherry trees and fragrances in the air, and suddenly things are greening up and there’s a sound, a new sound of birds that are back, you know, if they’re away for the winter.
And it’s a whole body, whole spirit, whole soul experience. And that’s the beauty of having a natural environment. So it’s more like forest, like what happens in spring in the forest? What happens in autumn, winter, summer? Same with fields. Maybe a natural play space is more field like metal like, or maybe it’s more beach like if you’re near a beach, how do you weave in those elements and aspects or a farm?
Maybe it’s farm with loose materials and hills and animals, or maybe it’s your backyard and how you weave all that stuff into your backyard. But I love that idea of offering children living environments, putting them in environments that are alive, that are changing, that are growing, that are inviting wildlife in.
Butterflies, birds, bugs, and that there’s dirt in there. There’s earth, you know, it’s like, what? Where are we living? We’re living on a planet. What is it? Children are curious. They are filled with wonder, curiosity, so let’s give them environments where they can explore, they can dig, they can ask those questions and find out answers, and have a relationship with that living environment.
Dirt change. Life and death too. Yeah. It’s all part of our lives. It’s all part of what I think children should have the opportunity to connect with, to ask the questions and learn and grow and explore. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I think so, and that idea of aliveness of life in the play environment, real stuff, maybe a little bit of mess is a nice balance to all the manmade stuff in all of our lives.
Right? A man and woman made, so many things are slick, smooth surfaces, slick toys, walls at right angles, smooth surfaces, antiseptic. Cool smooth surfaces versus living environments, messy environments, changing environments, evolving environments changeable, where children can change the environments.
And it’s for all ages. No matter what developmental level your children are at nature has something to offer and we can put natural stuff in their environments. To invite them to explore babies too. I think natural environments are best for babies. You know what’s good for babies? Fresh air, blue sky clouds, sun, grass, leaves, bird sounds.
Yeah. They’re taking it all in for the first time. So, yeah, that sounds pretty good, right? Natural place spaces, living environments. Now of course you could be doing this kind of thing and I’m sure you are. And what’s it like then if you are in childcare or school? You know, one of the big factors often is licensing.
Oh, what’s licensing gonna say? So many people that I work with you have to deal with that, right? Whether it’s, you know, your normal playground, are you following playground safety guidelines or if you’re doing natural play, what’s safe? What’s not safe? What do they think is safe or not safe?
And regulations and parenting and parents. So there’s more than just like being a believer in natural play scapes. Because in this day and age, we need to also be good communicators about natural play spaces, about natural play, about play. So licensing is, you know, one of the big pieces of the puzzle. And we’ll go deeper in this podcast.
You know, as we get going and more podcasts, we’ll dive into licensing deeper and have conversations about it and have some conversation with Licensers too. But it’s us to be able to form our reasoning, form our beliefs, get solid in what we believe in, what do we stand for with children’s play and with the environments that we can create for our children.
And why? And there’s plenty of research out there to say why natural play and connecting to nature is beneficial for children. So we can use those kind of words and research to communicate why we’re doing these things. Now I’ve heard all sorts of stories of licensing, you know, that don’t, you know, don’t let you do this or don’t let you do that.
And I’ve heard from people who’ve work with licensers and communicate well and have great relationships and they do all sorts of wild, risky, play, natural play stuff. But I’ve, gotten emails from, a lot of times it’s universities who say, Hey, we got. Tree roots, they wanna take our trees out because there’s exposed roots and licensing thinks it could be a tripping hazard.
What do we do? So I often, you know, send me a picture, let’s have a look at it, see what’s going on. And more often than not the tree roots are like. A natural playscape feature dream come true where it’s like these neat roots that are right exposed and you can have your little hot wheels, cars or plastic dinosaurs in there, and it’s like a perfect thing.
And if licensers are worried about tripping hazards, well you know what? The whole world is a tripping hazard, right? I mean, everything. And so, you know, a lot of this with risky play and nature play and roots in our play space. Like, we want children to be able to navigate the world. A lot of this is mindfulness.
If there’s roots, if there’s a log, if there’s, you know, stuff in the environment. Children have to be keyed in. They have to be mindful, and that’s what we want as they navigate your play space and navigate the roots and navigate the world. So, and, and another thing I think thinking about, like, say a tray root thing.
Often if there’s like these awesome tree roots where there’s plastic dinosaurs and you know, hot wheels cars or little fairy huts built in, like, that’s like a key feature. So everybody knows that there’s roots there and you have to be mindful. Now with all this stuff, you have to think and the designer cap comes on.
It’s like, okay, where is that? Where are the, where are the roots or where are the boulders? You don’t want them in like a running area, soccer area, you know, kind of where there’s lots of action or near playground equipment where you could, you know, fall on it. Gotta watch out for hazards. So it’s a lot of, you know, placement, thinking about placement.
But maybe if you have roots, you want more, quote, quote, tripping hazards. Put more logs in, more branches in, because. That’s like life that’s connected to the woods, that’s navigating life. But you need to be able to exPlay it and we’ll dive into that in other episodes here. But licensing in general and talking to parents, the same thing.
Ways to kind of just, I always say like, the way to get around licensing is to follow the rules. Right. You follow the rules. And with natural play spaces, it is very easy to meet and exceed federal playground safety guidelines. You know, a lot of stuff’s left up to the licenser and they’re kind of making judgments.
So they can measure, they can, you know, measure it. Okay? Your playground equipment has six feet around it. It’s not too close to the fence. There isn’t a boulder within that safety zone around it. So they’re making judgements about your playground and your placement and stuff like that, but they’re also making judgments about you.
[00:15:18] Speaker: Does this person know there’s a boulder on their play space? I mean, they’re trained to make sure there’s no rocks, there’s none of that kind of stuff. There’s nothing hazardous. But they’re wondering, okay, do they know what they’re doing? Is this an accident? So really, when I hear the great stories about, you know, conversations with Licensers, you’re really helping licensers out.
By saying what your beliefs are and why you have logs in there, why you love those roots, what the children are learning, how they’re balancing, how they’re navigating the world, how they’re accessing risk, how they’re being resilient. If they do trip and they get back on they get back up. So it’s really that communicating.
So the licenser need to think, okay, do these people know what they’re doing? Or is this all an accident or is it mindful? Are you doing it mindfully? So the best places where they’re doing risky play and all sorts of natural things, they’re good communicators with their licensing and, and saying, Hey, here’s why I’m doing it.
Here’s the research behind it, why I’m doing it. Here’s how I keep it as safe as necessary. Here’s my safety precautions. Here’s how we are supervising and all that kind of stuff, and here’s our risk benefit analysis. We will go deeper into risk benefit analysis in another later episode, because that’s a whole thing.
But it’s basically the idea of like seeing something like a boulder or a log and saying, you know, in the old days it was like uhoh, that’s a risk, that’s a hazard. You could fall, you could poke your eye out, you could chip your tooth, you could break an arm. And of course, we don’t want any of that stuff.
So we say no. The, the regulator says no. The director says, no, we don’t want any of that stuff. But now we’re doing risk benefit analysis of said, log said, stone said tree roots. And then we’re saying, okay, here are the risks. You could trip, you could fall, you could, you know this, that and the other thing.
But you are the benefits. Here are the reasons why. We wanna have this stuff in the balance, the coordination, the self-esteem, the accomplishment, the fun, you know, the groundedness, the mindfulness, you know, and you start listing those things. And so suddenly you’re looking at the risks. You’re not ignoring them, but you’re also looking at the benefits.
And that’s what you can talk to your licenser about or your spouse in your backyard, or your grandparent or neighbors, or. People at the park who are wondering why you’re letting your child go up the slide. Well, here’s why. Here are the benefits. Alright, so back to natural place bases. Okay, so we’ve kind of got a little of the philosophy there, but then we can also think about actually, okay.
The practical stuff. And you know, the, the theme of this podcast is dream big, start small and never stop. So the same goes with natural play spaces. So we dream it up, you know, and so the dream could be you want a totally natural play space, hills and trees and sculpture and sand pits and mud kitchens.
And so you dream up. That’s the dream. Or a dream might be if you have fixed playground equipment. Now the dream may be to have natural play space play elements, kind of added supplements. To your more commercial playground. And then the other dream in dreaming it up could be to have an actual design, a master plan.
You come up with a plan, you’re dreaming it. ’cause then we’re gonna start small. But say even with a plan, if you’re in the northern hemisphere with me, where you’re listening, it’s, you know, spring coming, you know, up here. We like our spring projects. So, you know, first having a plan. Of what your design’s gonna be.
And then you can start picking off projects, selecting projects to do. And so that’s the beauty of kind of looking at your yard and coming up with a whole plan for it. I, I see how everything fits and flows together, or the mud kitchens go, gonna go over here. The tri track’s gonna go over there. The outdoor classroom’s gonna be over there.
The tree root area is gonna be over there. And then you know how it’s all gonna fit and flow together so that you start picking projects. You start small, you pick an easy fun project that you can plan. We’re gonna do a mud kitchen, so let’s plan it out. Where can we get materials? Who do we know that can help us build, where can we do it?
Where, where can we get a little money? And then building it. And then letting the children play with it. So this is the starting small. You observe, see what the play is like. Oh, is that working? Is that working? How we thought. You have the loose parts, you have the loose parts, and then you tweak it, and then you play on the next one and the next one, and the next one and the next one.
That’s the never stopping. Yeah. So speaking of small projects. Here’s some small projects you might be interested in trying. I’m all about planting trees, and if just one of you, one of you, dear listeners, planted a tree because of this podcast, I would feel like it is a total success. I’ve been successful.
Yeah, so maybe this season you can plant a tree and. If you’ve never planted a tree before, that’s okay. It’s relatively easy. There’s a few things you gotta make sure to do, but I bet there’s somebody that you know in your circle, either of fellow staff or spouse or family, friends, community that know how to plant a tree.
And certainly there’s businesses in your community that know how to plant a tree so they could help you too. And certainly you can look on YouTube and there’s lots of videos about how to plant a tree. Maybe I’ll make a video about planting a tree sometime. So, when you plant a tree, you wanna think about, you know, especially with, you know, you don’t have lots of time for maintenance and everything to, one of the ways to help yourself is to have plant native trees.
Trees that know how to live in your climate, in your area. And they’re easier to care for. They know the water, they know what the sunlight, they know what the seasons are like in your area, and they’re used to it, so that, that makes it easier to care for. And then when you, when you’re thinking about trees to select, think about seasonal interest.
Yeah. What does it look like in spring and you’re celebrating spring? Does it change? Does it have blossoms? Does it have fragrance? Does it have color? Does it have fruit? Does it have things that could be for play, like seed pods? And then how about fall? Does it change color and fall? You can paint your outdoor play space in autumn by the color of the leaves of the trees that you choose to plant in fall.
One of my favorite play spaces here in Ithaca, it’s completely yellow. Yellow leaves up above, and then yellow leaves are falling down and then yellow leaves are covering the entire play space. It’s beautiful and it’s so different than it was in the summer. It’s so different than it was in the spring and so different than it was in the winter too.
Okay, so tree, here’s another project. Garden bed. Yeah, just have a garden bed and you could just. Make it with two by fours, two by sixes. Again, go to YouTube, how to build a garden bed. You could buy garden beds, you could buy galvanized kind of those drinking, like horse drinking. What are the troughs?
Yeah. And fill that with dirt and grow your stuff. And you could have some garden. Maybe you start with one, but maybe you do a few. And some could be just for digging. Don’t even have to plant in there that is just a garden bed filled with dirt. And you dig. And maybe that’s a great thing. If you have fixed equipment and a total, you know, more of a rubberized surface, we’ll start putting some garden beds out there filled with dirt.
You can have one filled with dirt, one filled with sand, one filled with, you know, wood chips, other materials, and just let them dig. But garden beds can also be used to garden. So, yeah, you could have some garden beds that are for experiments with seeds to see what comes up. You could have garden beds that are growing food.
You could have garden beds that are growing flowers. You could have garden beds that are growing, materials that you can snip and clip and use in the mud kitchen for the concoctions. You can grow food. You can go herbs mint. And I’ll tell you, I visit, I visit many schools and childcare centers and they, they have garden beds, but maybe the teacher that was really the one behind it, they’re not there anymore.
So the garden bed is just full of weeds. And sometimes, you know, the director might be like, oh gosh, you know, look at it. It’s all weighty. And don’t look at that garden bed. Don’t look at that garden bed. They’re embarrassed. But to me. A garden bed full of weeds is still awesome. I mean, come on. Look, it’s, it’s living stuff.
It’s stuff that’s growing, stuff that’s going for, it might bur burst into bloom or have its own little flowers or own little seed pods, and it’s a place kids can dig and it’s probably inviting wildlife in. So even a bed full of weeds is good. And then of course you can break out of the garden bed box and just plant herbs and plants and all sorts of stuff everywhere.
But a garden box is a good starting small, another project how about a hill? And I’ll say that you know it, it certainly does not have to be an adult sized mountain. It’s a kid mountain, so it doesn’t have to be. As big as, so you think it’s a mountain?
It could be just two feet tall, three feet tall. I’ll say during covid, I had like a hole digging challenge, put it out there to, to y’all. And so we did some hole digging in our backyard and we just dug a hole and we put the dirt, plopped it on, made a little hill. I mean, just a little bump, one foot tall by like, I don’t know, three foot around.
So teeny. But I’ll say that every time the kids were out there in the yard, where do they like to stand on that little bump? So yeah, when they’re running, run up the bump, run down the bump. So just like a little attractive thing. So you could do it with dirt, you could get a dump truck load, top soil, fill soil.
You could get a pickup truck load, or you could have that mini, mini bump, or you could do it with wood chips. In Ithaca, there’s a huge mountain of wood chips. The City Department of Public works grinds up and has, and we can all help ourselves so that we can make, you can make a wood chip, mountain tree service places have that kind of thing too.
Maybe you can get it delivered. Yeah. Alright, so there’s some projects with loose parts and there we go. Natural play scapes. All right. All right. I’m curious if you have questions about it so you can email me some questions at Play Nature podcast@gmail.com. And speaking of questions, here are some questions from you.
Three questions here, and then we’ll let you off the hook. We live in a desert, not many trees or woodsy plants. What else can we use Now? I’ve worked with people in deserts before and had the, this question come up a lot of times because, you know, when you see images of natural play scapes on Pinterest or in our dreams and books and everything, often they’re kind of like, you know, green maple leaves and green grass and sunflowers and gardens and, you know, stuff that look more like it’s from like.
New England, right? Yeah. Kind of. That seems like stereotypical, but what if you live in the desert and I have seen people in the desert try to make green grass and plant northeastern, you know, new englandy trees. We don’t have to do that. No. And, and really I believe that, that, yeah, that’s not necessarily the direction you go, if that’s the direction you’re going.
Okay, great. But I believe that your play environment should be a reflection and a connection to where you live, where your children live. You know, if they’re by the beach, it should be beachy. If they’re, you know, in the woods, in the mountains, it should be like that. But if you’re in the desert, what if your play space was deserty?
And one thing I love about like the deserts is the desert floor. I like that term, the desert floor. And it’s like a combo of sand and dirt and rock and, and what does grow in your area. So I’m like the idea of a natural place space in the desert that might have it. Topography that matches, you know, your desert terrain.
And then it has like the, it’s the desert floor. So children like as if they’re in the desert themselves, put them there in a safe way. And so are there plants that like it there, you know, whatever it is, you can still, you can have shade. If you can’t grow the classic shade trees of the Northeast, you could have your sun sails.
Or gazebo areas for shade. But I say, you know, have the rock, have the sand, have that desert floor stuff. And that’s great to, for your children to explore. There is a beautiful book about kind of adventure play and nature play in the desert called Rocko Boxin. Rocko Boxin, RO. XA Roxa, BOX box, EN, Roxa, boxing, and it’s about the story of children kind of creating their own nature play area in the desert by their house.
Yeah. Love it. Okay, next question. What types of sheds or storage is recommended for outdoor materials and tools? In some ways, whatever storage you can get your hands on. Now if you can get like the classic like eight by 10 storage shed, that’s awesome. If you have room for that or if you have money for that they can be a little pricey.
But I think that is a great way to go, first of all. And when you think about what you’re spending your money on in your outdoor space. You know, a lot of people think, oh, okay, we’re spending on equipment, we are spending it on swings, we’re spending on trikes. Okay. That stuff. And they might think of a shed as an extra thing kind of secondary, but I kind of think of a shed as primary almost.
And like if you didn’t have any equipment, but you had a shed, and then that shed was filled with all your loose parts. Mud kitchen stuff and trikes and hula hoops and balls and boards and plastic dinosaurs and you know, on and on and on. Like that is the pizazz. That’s the great stuff. So maybe you had no equipment, maybe you had no natural play space, but you had the storage shed for loose parts.
That’s a great way to go. Now another way besides having just kind of the big central play shed is to have satellite, small little storage units. And they could be like little storage benches kind of tucked in here and there. Or it could be like milk crates or like plastic outdoor garbage bins with holes drilled in so they don’t collect water.
And I like this idea of having smaller storage. Kind of where you need it. So near the sand pit, you have a little storage bench and that’s where you have the buckets and the shovels and the bins and the sifters. Same thing with near the mud kitchen there you have a little storage area there, or if you have an art area, you have storage there that has art materials and chalk and paper and you know that squirt guns filled with.
Food, coloring water. I don’t know. So yeah, so you can kind of think about that. Just having little storage areas all over the place.
And here’s the last one. My licenser will not allow pea gravel accessible to children. How sad is that? The children love, love to play with rocks. Yeah, you know, this, this is another one of those funny ones because, okay, so this person, their license is saying no pea gravel, but other places, pea gravel is what they use as a fall surface under play equipment, like seriously, all across Canada.
If you’re Canadian, you know what I’m talking about? Pea gravel. That is like the, the fall surface of, of choice up there. I think the wood chips freeze. They think, or, and they have there, there’s reasoning, but it’s different than in the states. Like some people have pea gravel, but not everybody. But in Canada, I see it more pea gravel than not.
So in that sense it’s like pea gravel is like what you’re supposed to have, but here’s their, the licenser saying, no, you can’t have pea gravel. And so this is more one of those conversations that the next, maybe the next. You know, if the licenser says that the next word should be, well, why? Why? How? Come tell us what, why no P gravel.
And if they’re like, well, you know. If it’s age appropriate or developmentally appropriate, or babies putting in their mouths and stuff like that, you know, they could have some reasons, but they also might just have those reasons of, that they make up in their head of throwing it or chipping teeth or in the eye or in the mouth or, you know, and okay, that’s legit, but it’s only half the story.
Right? The risk benefits. Okay, those, those might be the risks. Those are the things that could be a little hazards, but what are the benefits? I mean, if you love pea gravel, I mean, if you talk to Canadians, I think they don’t like their pea gravel that much, but pea gravel can be great because maybe you can’t have sand.
I’ve worked with elementary schools that can’t have sand for the mud kitchen, but they can have pea gravel. So it’s like a loose film material. And I’ll take any loose film material over no loose film material. So again, it is having the conversation with licensing. And rocks. Maybe it’s not pea size.
Maybe you get, maybe you want bigger ones, bigger rocks. If your children love, love, love playing with rocks maybe you work with the licenser to think, okay, what kind, what size rocks? And maybe they, they might be more worried about baseball size rocks. So maybe you have bigger rocks that are more pumpkin sized, so children aren’t throwing them, but you have to roll them.
It’s a pea gravel for giants. Right. So it’s all kind of what you feel comfortable with, thinking about how you’re managing the situation, how you’re, you can prove to your license or you show them this is intentional, this is mindful, and here’s how I’m supervising and taking care of, taking care of it.
Taking care of business. Yeah. Alright, well there we go. Natural Playscapes, episode three. Thanks so much for listening here beside Six Mile Creek in Ithaca, New York, and wherever you are, I wish you good luck, and if you have questions or comments you can email me at playnaturepodcast@gmail.com.
All right, play on.
