Bogin Playscape Project

Today was our final class for the semester, and we met at Nonotuck with Julie Guazzo to hand over the exercise and activity notebook the students have been working to complete. Each student got a chance to describe a few of the activities they devised, and the binder included 5 activities from each student.  Nonotuck will try these out over the next month or so, and we will be back in January to follow up.

This was also our chance to give out out first “ball stomps” to be used by real live kids!!  Julie picked out two from the 10 that were completed, and we await feedback on how they work!! We are  also looking forward to pictures or short video clips for use on the website. Stay tuned!!

Other important news;  Finally we have video up on the website!!!

The September 23rd panel discussion is now available for anyone who is interested in motor development among infants and pre-school children. I am especially pleased and proud to be able to share the knowledge from these local clinicians with a wider world. Please view and send comments!!

PLEASE CHECK OUT THE LINK ON OUR RESEARCH PAGE!!!!!!!

We met at Springfield College today, to receive the presentation from the OT management class (they have been responsible for the new research page on the website).  The presentation was intended to be a “business plan” for the playscape project, and included much more than just the research articles that are on the site.  I am grateful for all the hard work that went into the presentation, and it will certainly be helpful as we start to search for grants to have such an impressive presentation notebook describing the project. The four students who contributed to the project as part of the OT management class are;

Brittany Atwood

Steven Flathers

Elissa Maruca

Annette VanderStaay

And a special thanks to Elissa, who also volunteered to paint and finish a “ball stomp”, with a wonderful animal theme.

This was also the date we set to look at the final versions of the ball stomps, and try them out with a few different sized balls, to see how all the ball holder solutions stand up to real play. This will be the first equipment that kids will use, so we need to make sure all the details regarding safety are looked at closely.  A few of the ball holder designs may need parts replaced, but the solutions everyone came up with show a great variety of possibilities,  using inexpensive materials.

We also shared the exercise book activities,  and went over final versions from each student. These will be gathered into a notebook for Nonotuck next week. We will also have a few ball stomps to pass out!!

We finally have some pictures!! Ball stomps in action… 

We met at the Children’s museum today, and got started with the “movement activity book”  project. Each student is choosing five different exercise/ activities; two from the “Growing an In Sync child” book and three of their own ideas. The Carol Kranowitz book is a real treasure, and  it gives a template we can use to describe the activities and what motor skills are involved with each exercise.  There’s still a few weeks left, and we hope to be able to present these activities to at least one of the pre-schools and start to get some feedback. We also discussed the whole semester, and how we are just beginning with this project, and that we will need to re-think and re-work these activity books before we can post and share them… The “ball stomps” are also getting ready for kids to try out, and we will have something tangible to put out into the world and watch how kids respond!

Today’s class began with a presentation on a wonderful research project by Nancy Milch, an Occupational Therapist in the Holyoke Schools, who has also had experience in Nicaragua in recent years. Nancy joined us for our panel discussion back in September,  and I wanted to give her a chance to share her research in more depth than the panel discussion permitted. Her research project compared fine motor skills of pre-school children in Holyoke and Nicaragua.  The impetus for her research came from a sense that children in rural communities have a great deal more opportunity to develop motor skills compared to children in urban settings like Holyoke.  This is related to the amount of time children in rural Nicaragua spend playing outdoors, climbing trees, helping with chores and tasks like gardening as part of their daily lives. This active participation in daily chores and activities, along with more time playing outside, seems to  result in children with a better sense of their bodies and improved hand skills as they enter school. Though the group of children studied was small (8 children in each community) there were dramatic differences in the amount of time children in each community spent in front of “screens” , including TV and video games, as well as outdoor playtime. It makes so much sense that kids need  active play and exploration outdoors to build their hand skills, and TV and video games doesn’t provide the rich experience of real life.

The class also presented their “equipment reviews”, where each student chose an inexpensive item (less than $50.) from one of the commercial equipment companies, and reviewed it.  This is another direction where I hope we can have an impact, in reviewing and recommending inexpensive commercial items that pre-schools can choose when they have some money available. The students had to work from pictures and descriptions only, and didn’t have the equipment in hand for the review. But in the future, we would like to make equipment reviews part of out website and educational help for preschools (more funding would help!)

I met after work with the members of the OT management class at Springfield College. They have been working on background research for the Playscape Project,  which will soon begin to emerge on the website. There’s a new page heading on our site for research, which will start to grow as the students add what they have found for us.  I want to have the research on the site to help support the goals of the project, and offer more detailed information on what others are doing related to motor development among pr-school kids.  Issues of safety and how to address kids need to move and explore within the existing safety and licensure regulations for pre-schools and daycare centers are also crucial to the success of the project.

I met early Wednesday morning with staff from Dean Technical High School,  in Holyoke.  This is Holyoke’s vocational high school, and they have a woodworking program that  could be a wonderful connection for the playscape project. I met Nelson Garcia, who directs the woodworking program, and we talked about collaborating with Bill Diehl from the Collaborative (The Collaborative is currently running Dean Tech, and also are the non-profit sponsor of the Bogin playscape Project).  It would be a wonderful connection to have high school students from Holyoke building equipment for pre-school kids in their own communities.  I brought a “ball stomp” for Nelson to see, describing how we are looking to start with very simple designs, inexpensive and easy to duplicate.  He feels the Dean Tech program could easily make ball stomps, and was even interested in helping come up with the design of  the”connector” piece we still need to form a “group stomp” ; so kids could use several ball stomps at the same time as a group activity.

As the project moves forward, we intend to form collaborations with more organizations that can help spread ideas and widen the impact of the project.  I look forward to working on more basic equipment designs that high school students can make for pre-school kids!

We were back at the Children’s museum today, where we saw the different designs and decorations used for the ball stomps. I love how each one was totally different,  and the decorations make the ball stomps more inviting with bright colors and even a story book alligator!  The solutions for the ball holders were interesting, using sticks wrapped in tape, bottle tops and found materials-  keeping costs low, and even adding a nice “recycle” theme.  There’s more work to be done yet before we can send these out for kids to play on,  and we also had a good discussion about what it means to send something out into the world… Is it as safe as we can make it??  Will it stand up to kids who may not always play with it as we intended??

We talked about some options for how to connect the ball stomps to make a group activity. The assignment for next week is for each student to design a method to connect more than one ball stomp so they can be played  with together- and that allows them to be used either individually or placed in the holder by the kids to make the group arrangement. 

This was our first real work to put something together that kids will use for play. The ball stomps are a ridiculously simple design; one long board, (we used a good quality 1/2″ baltic birch plywood, 8″ X 28″)  and a rounded block mounted on the underside (pre-made with an 8″ section from a stair rail)  to make a pivot point. Place a ball on the low end of the lever, step on the lever and the ball flies up to be caught. A simple idea, but  an activity that teaches a number of motor skills kids need while they have fun. You need balance skills to hold one leg on the ground and step forward to stomp, you need visual tracking skills to follow the ball as it comes up toward you, and you need to figure the right amount of force to get the ball to come up so you can catch it… Yet even with something so simple, there are design choices that will make a difference in how the toy is used and whether it can stand up to the demands of young kids.

We got a tour of the wood shop at Smith, the Center for Design and Fabrication, from Eric Jensen, the manager. After a quick safety lecture, we got started sanding and assembling the ball stomps.   It was a pleasure to watch everyone sand and use a drill and  put in a few brass wood screws, and soon there will be 10 ball stomps for kids to use!!  Each student gets to custom paint 2 ball stomps, and figure out a way to hold the ball on the angled board.  This is a small but crucial detail,  coming up with an idea that is durable, low cost and versatile (i.e. can hold everything from a tennis ball to a beach ball in size).

The other design project coming up will be to design a way to connect several ball stomps to turn it into a group activity.

We will meet back at the Children’s Museum in Holyoke next week to show off our custom designs!

Today we met back at Nonotuck with Julie Guazzo, and presented tentative proposals for  making changes to the “community room”.

We are looking to set up both short term and longer term plans.   Julie will share the proposal with staff and families, and get back to us.

Setting up a binder with specific exercise ideas,  helping define areas within the community room where  certain activities take place (like a path or track  for riding toys)  and using a few of our “ball stomp” toys all seem like short term projects we could accomplish this semester.

Next week we work to assemble a dozen “ball stomps”- our first tangible play equipment!

10/21/11- Holyoke Children’s museum

Today was the first opportunity for each student to propose how we could best offer help to the Nonotuck pre-school as they try to modify the large “community room” to encourage more gross motor play.   There were some great ideas, starting with changes in the set up of the community room,  taking out some of the toys and activites that are duplicated in the classrooms. This would likely help make the focus more on exercise and gross motor play.  There were also lots of ideas for ball games, setting up targets and baskets on one wall, making some “ball stomps” ( a simple design we can easily duplicate)  and options for connecting the ball stomps to make  it more of a cooperative small group activity.  Other ideas for  a  low height rope climber, multi basket basket ball hoop and changes to the floor and  wall surfaces were also proposed, as low cost methods of  adding ideas for games and focused play.

This coming week the students  will work to combine the 5 different proposals into a single document we can present to Julie Guazzo at Nonotuck on 10/28/11.  Here’s to on-line editing!!!

Tom Murphy