NYC ended up taking up more posts then expected, so, I promise, this will be the last one. On Sunday, we spent the morning at Imagination Playground in the South Street Seaport. A few months ago, the New Yorker published a short article on the history of playgrounds and featured Imagination Playground when discussing the future of playground design. The vision behind Imagination Playground is to "encourage child-directed, unstructured free play." According to the their website, "with a focus on loose parts, Imagination Playground offers a changing array of elements that allows children to constantly reconfigure their environment and to design their own course of play." I was curious to see how my children would react.
The good news is that the girls loved all the water (the playground has both a beach area and a pool area). On the downside, none of my children were as interested in the moving parts as I had hoped. Once my oldest daughter figured out that she was too heavy to float on a block, she tried to bury it in the sand. All that being said, the truly unique part about Imagination Playground was watching all the parents interact with their children. Adults loved the moving parts concept, so, rather than reading newspapers, parents were building forts and houses and cars and their children were loving every minute of it. Pretty fun to watch. If you're ever in NYC, check it out.
For more on Imagination Playground, click here - http://imaginationplayground.org/parks/
And for a summary of the New Yorker article, click here - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/05/100705fa_fact_mead
No comments:
Post a Comment