The wide variety of outdoor equipment now available for schools can make it extremely difficult when it comes to choosing what apparatus to buy. It doesn’t make it easier that modern school playgrounds are not just used for play, but for afterschool activities, outdoor learning and community events. Taking all these things into consideration, here are some of the most essential features of a school playground today.
Play zones
A play zone is not a piece of playground equipment but an essential design feature. Modern playgrounds are designed in a way that allows related activities to be grouped together and kept away from other activities that might disrupt them. For example, a messy play zone could include mud kitchens, sand pits and water play items, and as this kind of play might get interrupted by children running around kicking and throwing a ball, you would place the sports zone away from the messy play zone.
There are a variety of zones you can create, each focusing on a different type of activity. Besides messy play and sports areas, you could also have zones for imaginative, creative and sensory play, climbing zones, a nature area, an outdoor classroom and a seating and dining zone.
Surfacing
Plain old asphalt playgrounds are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Modern surfacing alternatives are safer, longer lasting and available in a range of colours, enabling you to provide more attractive and inspiring places to play. One of the most popular new playground surfaces is wetpour. Made from recycled rubber, it provides a firm but cushioned surface and excellent grip. As a result, it can reduce injuries from falls and slips and makes it ideal for putting under and around climbing equipment.
Most schools now opt for a range of different surfacing, each used for particular purposes. Aside from wetpour, these include artificial grass, resin-bound gravel, rubber mulch and block paving. Between them, they can be used to create sports pitches, green areas, hard surface courts, pathways and even tricycle paths.
Climbing equipment
Another essential feature of a school playground is climbing equipment. Walk past any public park and you can see straight away how much children love climbing apparatus. When schools carry out pupil surveys about the type of play equipment they want, climbing equipment invariably comes at or near the top of the list. While undoubtedly great fun to play on, playground climbing equipment also provides a range of important benefits to children. As a form of active play, it’s good for both physical and mental health. It also helps develop physical skills like coordination and balance; life skills, like risk-taking and resilience; and social skills, like turn-taking.
Today, there is a wide range of climbing equipment available for schools. This includes play towers that come with various climbing features, Trim Trail obstacle courses, weird and wonderful rope climbing equipment and modular climbing frames featuring all kinds of different challenges. You can even get interchangeable climbing equipment where you can switch rope play activities around to create new adventures every day.
Outdoor classrooms
While playgrounds have long been used to deliver PE, today, they can be used for almost every subject on the curriculum. And with interior space being at a premium, an outdoor classroom can be a godsend when you need a bit of flexibility with rooming. The other big advantage of an outdoor learning space, of course, is that it enables kids to get out from behind their desks and do some active learning. They’ll have the space and freedom to work more freely, especially in pairs and groups.
With an outdoor classroom becoming one of the essential features of a school playground, the range of equipment available has expanded tremendously over the last few years. When it comes to seating, for example, you can have everything from large octagonal shelters with built-in seats and whiteboards, to reading corners with magical storytelling chairs and toadstool-shaped seats. There is specialist outdoor equipment for different subjects too. There’s equipment for monitoring the growth of plants, measuring the weather, making music, dancing and performing, solving mathematical puzzles and learning the time.
There is also a huge range of interchangeable learning boards that can be put up and taken down at the start and end of each lesson. These cover almost every subject, including English, maths, science, art, geography, history and MFL.
Conclusion
Modern playgrounds are far different to the sparsely equipped tarmac spaces that most teachers experienced when they went to school. Today, the essential features of a school playground include well-equipped play zones, a range of functional surfacing, climbing zones and an outdoor classroom.
For more information about all the equipment mentioned above, visit our Products page.
