Playgrounds to get green treatment

By TREVON MILLIARD Chronicle Staff Writer

Picture a playground without metal railings or elevated floors. No monkey bars, swings or fire poles. The ground isn’t covered in woodchips or gravel, and no dump-truck tires poke out of the ground.

Instead, grass covers gentle hills and creeks meander through a flowery meadow where children climb on rocks and amble over a trail. Sandboxes have lost their walls, and slides are just a part of the hills, sunk into the ground and following the lay of the land.

A New Hampshire business called Natural Playgrounds builds non-conventional play areas such as these, and Bozeman’s Learning Circle Montessori Elementary School has decided this is what it and its children want, said Dani Stern, who runs the school.

Natural Playgrounds does most of its work in the East, but this project could be the first of its kind in Montana, said company owner Ron King.

Learning Circle’s current playground has a few tractor tires sticking out of the ground, a swing set, two soccer goals and a small monkey bar set, said parent Meghan Kempt.

“Our playground is horrendous now, embarrassing,” said Kempt, who has two children attending the school and another who just graduated from the fifth grade, the highest grade taught at the school.

Months ago, the school’s playground committee - consisting of parents - was searching for ideas and discovered Natural Playgrounds’ Web site, Stern said.

The natural playground isn’t a sure thing for the Montessori school yet because it hasn’t finalized plans yet, she said.

“The contract is in our hands,” Stern said, “but we have not signed it yet.”

A natural playground is more expensive than most playgrounds - Just the design would cost about $12,000, with construction running at about $60,000 - but worth it, she said. Natural Playgrounds draws up the design and a local contractor does the landscaping.

“If we were going to go for the basic playground with slides and twirly things, the cheapest would be $40,000,” Stern said.

The beauty of a natural playground is that each playground is specifically designed to fit the existing landscape, King said. The buyers decide what they want, add can even add a rocky hill, or whatever they can think up, at any time down the road. The options are endless, just like nature.

“If you think of your favorite place to go in the woods,” King said, “that’s what we try to create. ... We create a miniaturized landscape and the kids have a ball.”

He recently added to one playground a 40-foot-long dinosaur made of twigs, and a bridge to span a land gap to one playground, he said.

“When (buyers) get into it, there’s a lot of creativity that happens,” he said. “It’s just phenomenal.”

In this aspect, the natural playground fits very well with the Montessori educational method, Stern said.

Italian educator Maria Montessori developed an educational model in the late 19th century that emphasizes self-directed activity on the part of the child, stressing physical activity in absorbing academic concepts.

The playground would lend itself to teaching through doing, said Horatio Potter, president of Learning Cirle’s board of trustees.

Standard playgrounds don’t do that, Kempt said.

Even worse, children outgrow monkey bars and other playground equipment or become bored and do things that can result in injuries. Learning Circle’s existing playground, for example, is now too small for the older children,” she said.

Once children outgrow normal equipment, they use it improperly to stay occupied, King said.

“They climb up slides, jump off playgrounds or hide under them,” he said. “I used to wait ‘til the swing was at the very highest point and jump off.”

Last spring, King gave a presentation to Learning Circle’s faculty, parents and children. He showed children pictures of streams and hills placed next to pictures of various playgrounds, and he’d ask, “Would you want to play here or here?” Kempt said.

“Every time, the kids would choose the natural,” Kempt said. “It’s instinctive.”

Even though the school is still in negotiations with King, parents and children are excited for what might come, Kempt said.

“This playground lends itself to any neighborhood,” she said. “I would build this in my backyard if I could.”

Trevon Milliard can be reached at tmilliard@dailychronicle.com or 582-2657.

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