The whole point of a school playground is to give children opportunities to play. However, without the right equipment, the result is often boredom and this can affect pupil behaviour both in the yard and back in the classroom. To prevent this, playgrounds need to offer children excitement, challenge and fun. To help, we’ve put together some of the equipment that we find children get most excited about.
Free-Flow Climbing Frames
Once only found in public parks, in recent years climbing frames have become highly popular features of modern school playgrounds. Children of all ages love to play on them, both on their own and with their friends.
Our Free-Flow Climbing Frames bring excitement by providing circular courses with no defined start or end. Children have to decide upon their own route and challenge themselves to see whether they can get around the entire apparatus successfully. Achieving this may take a lot of practice, requiring them to master a number of different challenges, depending on the Free-Flow model you choose. These can include jungle bars, tight ropes, rope bridges and rope traverses, traversing walls and tyre bridges.
Trim Trails
Offering a different kind of obstacle course, but equally as thrilling and exciting, is our Trim Trails range. The great thing about Trim Trails is that you select different pieces from our collection to design a course that is the right fit for your playground and which satisfies the needs and likes of your pupils.
Using sturdy wooden equipment, the Trim Trails provide a range of challenges that deliver real excitement while developing pupils’ problem solving, stamina and resilience. Children can also set themselves and each other challenges about how they tackle the course. And with nearly sixty different challenges available, including interchangeable equipment, you can keep the excitement going.
Individual pieces include jungle bars, wobbly planks and bridges, tyre bridges and steppers, rope traverses, twisty rope challenges, stepping logs, dip bars, leapfrog posts and more. To ensure that the pieces are appropriate for children of different ages, we have put them into four different categories depending on their difficulty, size and height.
Messy Play
The idea of playing with mud, sand and water is enough to bring a smile to any child’s face and for younger children, messy play can be one of the most exciting parts of the school day. Of course, in today’s more sanitised world, ‘mud’ is a mix of sand and water rather than soil and water, which keeps kids, their clothing and the classrooms a whole lot cleaner.
The best way to bring messy play to a school playground is to keep it all together in a specially created ‘messy play zone.’ This lets children easily move from piece to piece, stops any sand and water from getting elsewhere and helps prevent children busy doing other things from getting in the way.
There is a range of equipment you can use to create a messy play zone, including mud kitchens, magnetic water walls, sandpits and sandboxes, creation stations and the very popular water chutes where children can race balls down cascading tracks.
Sports Pitches
Children have played sports during playtimes for as long as there have been playgrounds and there’s no bigger thrill than scoring a goal, getting a rounder, winning a game or bowling out the opposition. Today, of course, using a couple of jumpers for a goal is not the expectation, nor is it the safest approach. The ideal way to bring the excitement of sport to a playground is to provide the necessary sports markings and their accompanying goals, nets and stumps, etc.
These are now available for a variety of sports, including soccer, basketball, tennis, netball, rounders and cricket. Quickly installed and highly affordable, schools with limited space can even have multi-sports pitches so that different types of sports can be played in a single area.
Of course, with proper markings, the pitches help ensure the games stay within a well-defined area, away from other activities. The markings can also be used to deliver PE lessons and help children learn about the layout of pitches and rules of the sports they are playing.
Conclusion
After applying themselves to the rigours of the curriculum, children deserve a place where they can let off steam and have some real fun. A good playground will provide this and a key element of a modern playground is to offer activities that are exciting and challenging. While we have countless other exciting products your school may be interested in, over our many years of installing school playground equipment, those mentioned above are constantly at the top of pupils’ wish lists.
For more information, about these and other products, visit our Products page.
