A unique playground experience in Chestermere is wrapping up after a successful pilot year this past summer.
“The mobile adventure playground is a playground that uses unconventional materials and is focused on child directed play,” said City of Chestermere Community Recreation Coordinator, Katelyn Richards.
The goal of the playground was to ensure that kids could have control over their play with as little adult intervention as possible.
By giving kids unconventional items to play with such as cardboard boxes or an old bathtub, kids had the opportunity to engage their imaginations and take small risks in a safe environment.
“This playground introduces kids to healthy risk,” said Richards.
“If kids aren’t exposed to small risks or healthy risks, [then] when they’re older and they’re introduced to risks in their own life they won’t know how to approach them,” she said.
Richards said that the pilot program, “went really well this year.”
As a mobile playground, the program ran three days each week, Monday, Wednesday and half days on Friday, and visited different sites in Chestermere over the course of the summer.
The adventure playground was set up in Westmere, Springmere, at Anniversary Park, Eastlake school, Our Lady of Wisdom school and the Chestermere Regional Community Association.
It was also set up for special events such as Canada Day, Water Fest and the first National Play Day.
“We had a really great turnout,” said Richards.
“On a regular basis we had 15-20 kids at the playground per day.
“And we had even better numbers at special events we attended,” she said, “we had about 86 kids during that.
“It went really well,” said Richards.
She said that the found kids of all ages enjoyed playing at the Mobile Adventure Playground.
The one demographic that they didn’t see a lot of were kids 15-year-old and up, but those who did come had a lot of fun.
“We did our first youth night…at the end of the season to see how that would go and we had 15 youth come out for it so we think next year we’re going to have one evening opportunity for the Adventure playground each week,” said Richards.
In addition to encouraging older youth to come out, Richards said that by operating the playground in the evenings, working parents will be able to bring their kids to the playground.
Some of the favourite items to play with at the Mobile Adventure Playground included, carboard watermelon boxes, a fiberglass bathtub, pool noodles, a slide, keyboards, and sleds.
At each site, the supervisors would set up little vignettes or play areas with the various unconventional play materials.
“That was just to get the kids creative juices going,” said Richards.
The kids were told they could use the different items for anything they could think of.
Boxes became forts, the pool noodles became both construction materials and swords, and kids took turns pulling their friends across the grass on the sleds.
“Lots of really fun unconventional things kids had a lot of fun playing with,” said Richards.
She said that what makes the adventure playground both important for kids development and fun is how it encourages creativity and risk management.
“If you go to a regular playground you know what to do with a slide,” she said, “or you know what, culturally, we’re supposed to do…with monkey bars, you’re supposed to climb.”
“But when you come into our playground what are you supposed to do with milk crates?
“There is no prescribed way of playing with milk crates you can do whatever you like,” said Richards.
When it comes to learning how to gauge and manage risks, the fact that kids get to build their own play structures teaches them how to assess if they are safe.
“Like when you build something you know taking a look and assessing whether or not its structurally sound,” said Richards, “Can you actually climb on this and those types of risks kids are able to assess,”
The playground is finished for the season but with the project deemed a success, Richards said that the Mobile Adventure Playground will be back and ready to inspire kids to play in May.
