Outdoor Play

Playground equipment offers a vital, multi-sensory environment where children safely build essential physical, cognitive, and social skills. Through unstructured play, kids develop critical muscles, boost their self-confidence, and learn how to interact with peers and navigate challenges on their own.

Playground activities like swinging, climbing and sliding may appear to be "just fun" on the outside, but initiate important body systems to develop and function properly.

The movements children perform on a playground build both gross and fine motor skills, along with core strength. Playground play also enhances the vestibular system — the sensory system that controls balance and coordination — and develops better body awareness.

Swinging

The back-and-forth movement of swinging provides a child's nervous system with a wealth of visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive stimulation as they learn how their bodies move in space and how much effort it takes to increase or decrease their speed.

Sliding

Sliding integrates multiple senses, including vestibular, tactile and proprioception. 

A playground provides the environment needed for children to engage in elements that develop key cognitive, social and physical skills. How children play, or their patterns of play, reinforce the importance of having a mixture of playground equipment that encourages an assortment of play behaviors.

Collaboration and cooperation can be encouraged by specific components that require children to work together. Slides or zipline structures require turn-taking and communication. Seesaws also encourage collaboration because children can operate them as a team, some ride and some push. 

Problem-solving skills can be enhanced with various climbing elements. Children work to figure out how to physically navigate a piece of equipment, especially one that is new to them.

Persistence can be encouraged when a child keeps trying and doesn't give up when experiencing a playground activity that is difficult such as crossing the monkey bars. Once a goal is achieved or a skill mastered, the child feels a huge sense of accomplishment and increased self-esteem from working hard to reach a goal. Take a look at our Climbing & Hanging Outdoor Play Equipment

Playgrounds also offer the opportunity for children of different ages to learn from and help one another. Children will often copy or learn from older children or older children may help younger children—boosting them up while they were climbing, helping them on and off the equipment, encouraging them not to be scared, and offering to help them down from the top of a tall structure. These mixed-age social interactions are an important part of children's social experiences on the playground.