FOUND – Learning through Landscapes

Sometimes you find something and you think, “Hey! That totally fits what we’ve been talking about on the Leaner Driven Education blog!!” If that ever happens to you, please share it in a comment on the Learning Experiences tab above. Some of them we'll put into a FOUND post.

I’ll start.

My husband is a landscape architect, and in our family we love exploring new parks (and criticizing the flow of parking lots—weird huh?). We particularly love a great play ground. Here’s a picture of one of our favorite play grounds here in China.

The Chinese love to use cool rocks in their landscaping.

One of my favorite blogs is Playscapes. In her post, Natural Playground Inspiration from Learning through Landscapes, Arcady shared information about playgrounds that promote outdoor learning and play in natural play spaces. Here's one of the videos that she shared:



In LDE language, these play spaces do a wonderful job of creating learning experiences based on a child’s need to explore and create in open ended, physically demanding and challenging ways.

What I LOVE about these play grounds is how they have used largely materials that can easily be found in their environment/community. Did they consult experts in creating these playgrounds? Yes. But experts and parents and teachers were not the driving force, the children were. Did they take a chance? Yes! What I saw, however, was that the environment they created did such a good job helping the children to explore and create in open ended, physically demanding and challenging ways that the risks and problems that are found in other play spaces were almost nonexistent. And the rich environment naturally led to play that built upon the lessons they were doing in the classroom.

~What kinds of landscapes do you, or someone close to you, enjoy playing in?

~What do you have in your learning environment and community that will give your Learner a place to explore and create in open ended, physically (or otherwise) demanding and challenging ways? (and just for play ground type learning)

~vbb