Costessy School's Bug Hotel uses "silver birch logs, a bark-covered flower pot to act as a small mammal home, sections of plastic down-pipe filled with cut canes as bee homes, and a number of various-sized logs and flints all built on a base-board with willow framework, up which ivies could be grown to back the structure."
Whether or not you go so far as to install a bug hotel, if natural elements like stumps, rocks, and plantings are used on the playground, you'll have insects aplenty for projects and study.
And if you have a sea of artificial surfacing planted with metal poles and plastic platforms, well, you won't.
Along those lines, an excellent item to add to 'loose' playground equipment is some large plastic magnifying glasses, great for examining bugs as well as dropped bird feathers, rocks, and dirty fingers. Just don't show them how to start a fire!
But I'd also like to see some fixed magnifying lenses installed on playgrounds...they could be installed away from direct sunlight to avoid a fire hazard and kids could take their finds over to the lens to magnify them. It could be as simple as simple as embedding the lenses into holes drillled in a fence rail.
The pleasure of looking at things through microscopes and magnifying glasses played a large role in my decision to be a scientist when I 'grew up'; I'd like to see more children use them to engage with the wonders of the world around them.
The pleasure of looking at things through microscopes and magnifying glasses played a large role in my decision to be a scientist when I 'grew up'; I'd like to see more children use them to engage with the wonders of the world around them.
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