Water is an increasingly popular play element that offers numerous benefits for childhood development. Children love to splash in paddling pools, explore water walls and engage with water tables as unique sensory experiences 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 that has been found to not only provide a unique experience for play but to foster cognitive skills, promote social interaction, and inspire 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 the different senses, the trickling sounds, the cold feel of the water, and the unique fresh smell of water in the outside space. Incorporating a water wall or sand and water play table into your school playground or garden space is an excellent idea to provide an immersive and unique experience.
Children thrive with hands-on learning as part of interaction with a water wall, water table, or other messy play ideas for sensory activity centres like sand pits 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
For the school playground, play equipment can double up as a valuable educational way 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 a range of fluid dynamics and physics concepts.
By experimenting with water play during their break times, students can appreciate how what they learn in the science classroom impacts their everyday life. Water is a unique play element that demonstrates how gravity, density, and volume are real concepts they can explore and have fun with. 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.
The School Playground Company’s water wall sensory playground equipment can be installed and tailored for any size playground. This gives any school the opportunity for a unique, innovative play experience for its students. The wall itself includes multiple angled shelves for plastic half pipes to be placed wherever students want and have water poured down between the slopes. Kids can make the water trickle, drip, and flow in different ways, widening 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. Building a space where fun and experimentation are not only allowed, but encouraged with playground equipment specially designed to be used in creative ways gives 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 with a free quote or request a callback.
