Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Outdoors

A new climbing area is offering impressive challenge and variety, says King's Meadow Primary School's Sarah Obinna.

Our new climbing area is delighting the children and living up to our expectations by providing all the challenge and variety that we'd hoped for.

The climbing area is used by all the children but also forms part of the latest phase in our development of early years provision at King's Meadow Primary School, Bicester. In all the school has 370 children on its roll, with 80 of those in the Foundation Stage.

We started by refurbishing classrooms for our Foundation Stage unit. Next, we moved on to developing the outside area with the help of a local garden centre, creating some raised beds and setting about replacing our old climbing frame.

We knew that we didn't want a fixed castle or pirate ship and were determined that our new climbing area be as open-ended and challenging as possible. For inspiration, we visited other settings and Hill End, an Oxfordshire outdoor learning centre well-known for its training, resources and forest schools.

Although some outdoor equipment companies were recommended to us, we still felt their designs weren't open ended enough and we were keen to incorporate natural logs. In the end, we decided to commission local builder Trevor Stewart to build it and help with the design. Also providing input on the design were the children themselves. Their main request was that the area provided spaces and ways to create dens.

MULTI-LAYERED

The total cost of the climbing area was £15,000, with the PTA providing £5,000 and the remainder coming through fundraising and an award from the school governors.

The climbing area is built with impact surfacing flooring; it has delivered many of the features that we wanted. It is multi-layered, with various platforms and features such as grooves in the logs, enabling the children to access the area in a variety of ways. Other features are tunnels and a raised edged seating.

As the children wanted, there are various options for making dens. We are able to throw cargo nets over logs that stick out from parts of the structure and there is a small a small wooden house at the back of the structure.

The climbing area was installed in April and the children are delighted with it. It provides challenge, encourages reasonable risk taking, and the children are exploring it in more ways than we could imagine.