What's new at green? March 2010

 

Spring 2010.  It has been a long winter and a good one.  We worked with Castlemorton Primary School and created an outdoor classroom featuring a very large sandpit.  Then we worked with the headteacher of  Honeybourne First School during December and January to make a shelter and generally form a more coherent quiet area.  Then returned to St Margarets. Leamington Spa to vitalise their fields witha large tree planting project involving all the children. 

Now, we are putting the finishing touches to Worcester Woods Country Park Play Area phase 1:  this is the existing playground which we have updated and added a number of new pieces to.  Regarded with utmost affection by the people of Worcester, this play area is part of the large green space next to County Hall where the Countryside Service is located and there is the very good Orchard Cafe.  The secret of a good play space for younger children is to encourage the adults who accompany them, to feel part of the place and stay for longer than they would normally want to...and a good cafe is one way of ensuring some happy people.  In the future it would be good to see allotments ossociated with play areas.

Worcester Woods Play Area will be open in Mid March.  Later this year we will start work on phase 2 which is a space for older children on the slopes opposite the existing play area.  We have already put the design in place and it is currently going to planning...it features a wide, wavy slide; a large tyre swing; some high swings; a large boulder rockery; a fort and scramble nets; and a series of mounds with interconnecting bridges.  It has been a pleasure to be at Worcester Woods working with Rob Stevenson and his Countryside Centre folk.

Over the next few months we will be returning to Upton St Leonards Primary School and Harvington First School.  Both very interesting projects: at Upton, we will tie the school grounds together with a long climber clad avenue; a living roof structure; a hazel copse; and a sacred garden.   At Harvington we are creating a new forest schools area on a piece of land donated by the church.  Guy originally created the wild school grounds at Harvington in 2001-2002: a project that has been a great success...with the school receiving many visitors over the years to see how the children use the grounds. The new area will be a great complement to the previous project and is an encouraging endorsement of the work that we do...access to the natural world is the spark that fires children's creativity, and all positive lifelong associations with the natural world are formed in the early years. For more on this, see the download page.

Don't miss our downloadable doc "What is a Natural Play Space?" click the link to view or download.