Water is an increasingly popular play element that offers numerous benefits for childhood development. Children love play with water, in paddling pools, water tables, and water walls. Water play offers a unique sensory experience to stimulate the imagination.
Our mission as a playground equipment supplier is to promote healthy development through fun and inclusive playground equipment. Water play is a form of messy, sensory play with a wide range of benefits. Not only does it provide a unique experience for play but also fosters cognitive skills, promotes social interaction, and inspires independence through experimentation.
How can you adapt your playground to make the most of the wonderful ways sensory water play enhances experiences outside? Let our playground design experts give you a run-down of the benefits of water play and other sensory play equipment for schools.
Water Play as a Sensory Experience
Sensory play equipment is essential for any playground, especially for EYFS children. Multisensory environments stimulate healthy brain development for fine motor skills, coordination, and problem-solving.
Water is a great tool that engages all the senses with unique sounds, textures, and fresh smells. Therefore, incorporating a water wall or sand and water play table into playgrounds is a great way to create a truly immersive and unique experience.
Children thrive with hands-on learning as part of interaction with a water wall, or other sensory or creative play panels. Exploring new sensory experiences helps students understand the world around them with independence in a free-play, open-ended fun experience.
Water Walls as Unique Educational Outdoor Play Equipment
Play equipment can be a valuable educational tool for students to experience the benefits learning through play can provide. Water play creates many opportunities for learning and exploration with pouring, measuring, and experimenting with fluid dynamics.
Students can experiment with water play during breaks, learning to appreciate how science impacts every day life outside of the classroom. Water is a unique play element that demonstrates gravity, density, and volume in a simple, fun way. Bringing lessons outside to the water wall or wet play area brings excitement into lesson time for experiments and teaching that kids can understand and replicate, developing foundational skills for practical learning.
Our teams install water walls in any size playground to create great sensory areas. This gives any school the opportunity for a unique, innovative play experience for its students. The wall includes multiple angled shelves for plastic half pipes to be placed wherever students want. Once constructed, kids can make the water flow differently through the pipes. This can help to widen their understanding of how physics impacts the everyday world in unique ways.
How Kids Play with Water Walls and Water Tables
The versatility and freedom in messy play with water walls or sand pits are inherently appealing to childhood play. Providing a safe, intuitive space for this sort of free play with inclusive play equipment for a range of age groups and abilities is vital to allow all kids to experience this sort of play.
Self-expression and teamwork with cooperation on projects and water experiments are an additional way free play benefits children as they develop. Friendly splashing on the water table or building sandcastles in sandpits together are popular ways for sensory play equipment to harness the natural impulses children have for unstructured play into safe areas designed for it.
Mud, sand, and water play are a great combination for a designated corner of your playground. Schools should develop a space where fun and experimentation are not only allowed, but encouraged. Specialist playground equipment can be used in creative ways to give kids permission to safely play, expend their physical energy outside of lessons, and most importantly have fun!
What’s better than Water Play in the Summer Heat?!
This summer why not beat the heat with unique water play setups that work to provide a cool-down space as well as exciting sensory experiences?
Explore more of our creative, sensory, and imaginative playground equipment today, or get in touch and start your journey toward a revitalised playground.