Use Your Imagination, It’s a Jungle Gym After All
To keep children active, we need to teach them how to have fun. With video games and other entertainment options becoming so lifelike, we need to teach our kids how to play and use their imaginations more than ever.
School Daz, Inc. specializes in developing playgrounds for elementary school children. Our entire website highlights the physical fitness benefits of our playgrounds.
But we also emphasize fun.
In this article, I’ve decided to throw out a few fun and creative play suggestions using some of our most common playground components. Hopefully this will give parents, teachers and supervisors some ideas on how to interact with children and encourage them to go back and play again and again.
1. Jungle gym
School Daz, Inc. does offer a jungle theme, but you can still have fun by making your own jungle gym on the playground. Pretend to be animals and walk on all fours across the entire playground. If that’s too cheesy and way out of your comfort level, be Tarzan and swing across the overhead climbers to get to a platform you can call home.
2. Tea Party
Invite the children to a tea party you are hosting at the top of a platform with a slide. Sounds a bit sedentary, right? Make it active by “running out of supplies,” and have the children go down the slide to get various real or imaginary items across the playground.
3. Lava Tag
This was one of my favorite games to play on the playground where I grew up. The game is set up like a normal game of a tag with one main exception. You can’t touch the ground or you become “it”. This is a great game for developing balance and really stretching the problem solving skills of children (and adults playing it for that matter).
4. H-O-R-S-E Obstacle Course
If you’ve ever played the game H-O-R-S-E on a basketball course you’ll know that you challenge the other person to make trick shots. If the person can’t make the trick shot, they take a letter (H, O and so forth). The first one to spell the word HORSE loses.
You can do the same thing on a playground by making it an obstacle course. For example, you have to hop to the slide and back on one foot. If both feet touch, you take a letter. Be careful to make sure all the challenges are fun and safe. Running backwards up a slide isn’t safe. Be creative and have fun, but be safe.
5. Playground Twister
The game is really simple and can be a lot of fun with several kids. Plan ahead and take a look at the colors on your playground. Then take the spinner from a game of Twister or make one ( a simple image search will show you exactly what I’m talking about). On the spinner, put all the colors you can find on the playground. Call out the colors and have the kids run and put that limb onto the right color. For example, if you have a blue slide, you’d call out “Right hand blue” and the kids would have to run to the slide and put their hand on it. The faster you can call out the number, the more they kids will have to run to each piece of the playground.
It’s okay to call playgrounds a jungle gym. It’s okay to be a little goofy. Kids appreciate interaction and imagination. Have fun.
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[...] you’re in the market for a replacement jungle gym, you might want to take a look at the customizable playgrounds being offered by School Daz, Inc. [...]
[...] term jungle gym was coined in 1920, when a lawyer from Chicago aimed to enable children with an intuitive [...]