Pinemeadow Park Project

Nature playgrounds use natural landscapes, natural plants, and materials in a creative and interactive way for child play and exploration. Nature playscapes are created for the enhancement of a child's curiosity, imagination, wonder, discovery, to nurture a child's connectedness and affinity for the world around them.

Play components may include earth shapes (sculptures), environmental art, native vegetation (trees, shrubs, grasses, flowers, lichens, mosses), boulders or other rock structures, dirt and sand, natural fences (stone, willow, wooden), textured pathways, and natural water features. 

• Average time a child is engaged in spontaneous play on a traditional play structure is 19 to 22 minutes. The average time is as much as three times higher in a natural playground because kids are way more creative and engaged in play (Henderson Playgrounds, Bienenstock Playgrounds)

More Kids are Active

• On a traditional play structure, 80 per cent of the physical engagement for large muscle play and fitness is performed by 40 per cent of children (the most agile and physically fit), while 60 per cent of the children (the obese, disabled, unfit, or socially phobic) are almost completely sedentary.  (Franz Danner: http://rethinkingchildhood.com/2012/03/07/playground-safety/)

Kids Develop All Five Senses

• Natural playgrounds provide engagement for all five senses, as well as kinaesthetic sense, sense of place, and sense of wonder (Adam Bienenstock www.adambienenstock.com, Rusty Keeler, Author - Natural Playscapes, Robin Christie Childspace Inc. NZ)

Dirt is good

• It has been proven to increase healthy immune response, decrease irritable bowel and gut based chronic disease while reducing stress and increasing focus and attention spans( Mary Ruebusch, Dirt is Good: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27brod.html?_r=0)

Behaviour and Schooling Improves

• Children's behaviour and school work improve if their playground has grassy areas, ponds and trees (Natural England and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roamgenerations.html#ixzz2sxVGRRYh 2)
• The National Science Teacher Association recently published a doctrine that time in nature is an important building block for any advancement of STEM scores (Nat'l Science Teachers Assoc.: http://www.nsta.org/about/positions/natureofscience.aspx)