Playing in the water is one of the delights of childhood. It's a delight that is getting harder and harder for urban children to experience. While it is possible to head to an urban water park to play in the spray, playing in a stream or a pond opens up many other possibilities for water play. How can you install a water feature that creates opportunities for play but addresses concerns about safety?
Why Kids Don't Play in the Water
Water is no longer present in many urban environments. That's because streams are messy things. They meander, they flood, and in urban places they've been put into tunnels under the road so that they won't disturb traffic or flood homes. While this makes sense from a financial and city planning perspective, from an ecological and educational standpoint, it's a loss. There are also concerns about safety of water features, especially when children are not supervised.
The combination of these two concerns means that water is quite absent from children's play spaces today.
The Benefits of Playing in the Water
Water has many moods. It can be quiet, bubbling and calm, or it can lead to splashing and rambunctious play. By installing a safe water feature in a playground, the water will move children to play and to reflect.
Like sand, clay and mud, water is a malleable substance. This is enchanting to children, because it means that the opportunities for play are endless. For children, water is an open-ended science experiment.
Water is also a wonderful element in creative play. Whether the children are creating a tiny village or jumping over a lava flow, they will use water in their own story lines.
If you create a more naturalized water feature, the children will experience the diversity of life that accompanies that. Urban places can seem bereft of biodiversity. A stream or a pond surrounded by vegetation may eventually be colonized by local bugs. Birds will come to eat the bugs, and the children will be able to see life cycles in action.
Designing Safe Water Features
To create a safe water feature in a playground, consider the following:
- The depth of the water feature, to prevent accidental drowning
- The speed of the water
- The safety of items around the water feature, such as rocks or vegetation
- Keep the water moving gently to prevent mosquitoes from laying eggs
- Test the equipment to ensure that water drains and does not pool
You should also connect with local authorities to determine regulations and standards for water speed, depth, and layout.
A pondless water feature is ideal for a playground setting. These water features incorporate moving water to prevent mosquitoes from hatching,and they do not contain a body of standing water. Some playground design companies have integrated other features into the pondless water feature. Companies such as Flowform design playground streams that turn on and off using a switch.
You can also design a stream bed that is filled by the children themselves. A small cobble or gravel bed that is at a level slightly lower than the surrounding environment will ferry water down when the children pour it in buckets or spray it from the hose. This is an ideal solution for a child care center or preschool. The stream bed should lead to a drain or to a shallow pond that drains when water goes over a certain depth.
Supervision is key, especially if the water depth is greater than an inch. Make sure that your school or daycare has a dedicated supervisor for the water play area, someone who stays in the area to supervise the children's play.
No piece of playground equipment will ever be completely safe. It's possible to fall off a slide, and it's possible that children might trip on wet rocks. However, with careful design, you can create a playground water feature that follows safety standards and gives children a place to play.
Tricia Edgar - Tricia Edgar is a gardener, environmental educator, and science writer from the Pacific Northwest.
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