Kids need to spend time outside to experience and understand their environment. Reading about butterflies from a book is informative, but playing on seesaws in the wind and watching how their wings flap can provide a more interactive and immersive learning experience.
Unstructured outdoor play provides children with an opportunity to take risks and explore their boundaries and capabilities while at the same time learning more about their world through sensory experiences like squishy mud or melting ice.
Build the Vertical Posts
Building your seesaw starts with creating vertical posts. This process should be relatively straightforward using scrap wood from your workshop, which should then be cut to appropriate length and pilot holes drilled at 1", before attaching each support with screws and glue for stability against weight from both kids and adults alike.
Balanced seesaws require equal efforts on both ends to keep them horizontal; this is because their equilibrium prevents one side from shifting more than the other.
As such, it's vitally important that parents find ways to encourage outdoor playtime for their kids. Studies have demonstrated the numerous health and psychological benefits that outdoor play/time provides children, including helping obesity and social/emotional skills development. Unfortunately, despite its known advantages, play/time opportunities appear to have steadily declined. This may be caused by increasing screen time usage as well as changing sociocultural conditions or parental concerns about safety concerns.
Build the Base
Seesaws (also called teeter-totters) are longboards balanced in the center with one end higher than the other, where children sit and push against either side to raise or lower either end into the air. Most playground seesaws provide handles so children can hold on while taking turns riding them.
Researchers conducted a recent study with preschoolers and found that those who played outdoors more frequently were better coordinated than their indoor-playing peers. Furthermore, those who spent more time outdoors ran races faster on their feet and completed 10m races more quickly than their indoor-playing peers.
Outdoor play offers another advantage to cognitive development, by helping kids explore and interact with their environment while building friendships. While screen time typically involves repetitive and the same activities, outdoor play gives children opportunities to explore and discover their surroundings and interact with one another in new ways; outdoor play may lead to creative problem-solving skills as well as foster an appreciation of nature.
This systematic review identified several key correlates of outdoor play as key correlates of outdoor culture: boy gender, memberships of dominant race/ethnic groupings, being physically active, having electronics at home, living detachedly and warm seasons. Further exploration should focus on understanding how these variables interact both among themselves as well as with microsystem-level factors (household income, residence type, and peer/social support) to gain a comprehensive view of outdoor culture.
Build the Seat
Benefit #5: Outdoor play gives children a wealth of sensory experiences. Kids may better absorb what they learn about physics by experiencing it firsthand, like when squishing mud between their fingers or watching ice cubes melt in the sun - this provides them with an intuitive "embodied" understanding that can be applied directly to everyday life.
Seesaws can also help children build their physical confidence, which is particularly important for younger children whose development depends on taking risks and facing challenges to achieve goals and boost self-esteem. Seesaws and other playground equipment provide safe opportunities to test balance, coordination and strength safely - while making children feel good about themselves as they advance.
However, safety should always be the top priority when purchasing playground equipment such as seesaws and seesaws. In particular, their fall height (the highest point at which its seat can reach) must be taken into account in relation to other pieces and the surrounding landscape; additionally shock absorbing materials like FallZone Poured-in-Place should be added under their seats to ensure children do not experience sudden, painful contact with the ground.
Build the Handles
Building a seesaw requires all members of a group to work collaboratively toward one common goal, from design and instructions review, lashing tie off direction, and testing of the final product. It provides Scouts an ideal opportunity to develop pioneering skills while working as part of a team towards a common objective.
Seesaws offer children an enjoyable physical activity that will get them outside and moving, helping to develop balance and coordination skills that help prevent falls, trips, stiff walking gaits, and avoidance of physical work.
Kids also gain from outdoor play because it exposes them to nature. Experiences with physical principles and the environment make understanding concepts like physics and the environment much simpler for kids; remembering what "squish" means will be much simpler when experiencing mud between their fingers or conducting their experiments using melting ice cubes! Getting kids outdoors to play on seesaws will provide them with a deeper, intuitive, "embodied" understanding of these topics that will carry over into adulthood.
Build the Pipe Strap Clamps
As the basis of your seesaw fulcrum point, use a 2 by 12in (5.1 by 30.5cm) wooden plank of this length - available online or from local hardware stores - with 1'' pilot holes drilled at both ends and attached pipe strap clamps.
Outdoor play can help keep kids active physically. One study demonstrated this fact when preschoolers who played outdoors more frequently were able to run faster in a 10-meter race than their indoor-play peers.
Children who play outside can gain knowledge about nature while engaging in fun outdoor adventures. Activities like using sticks and rocks as toys, digging in the dirt, taking nature walks, and watering plants provide them with ample opportunity to explore this wonderful world of ours through outdoor play.
Spending time outdoors may provide significant psychological and physiological advantages for kids' mental health and well-being, with studies showing natural experiences having a restorative effect that reduces stress while increasing attention span and working memory performance.
Build the Beat Beam
Outdoor play can involve many different activities for children. Teeter-totters provide children with a way to learn about fairness, balance, and cooperation among friends while they experience sensory delights such as feeling the mud squishing between their fingers or watching water drip from tree branches. Furthermore, children can expand their cognitive skills by solving problems such as finding safe ways to cross a stream without getting wet, or understanding how ice cubes melt when exposed to sunlight.
Nature provides a therapeutic setting that can boost kids' concentration and working memory performance, yet it may be challenging to get them out and active when they would rather spend their time watching screens or playing structured playground games.
Key to increasing kids' outdoor play/time is finding ways to make it enjoyable and engaging, which makes seesaws an excellent option. They're easy to build and can be customized to meet specific needs; all you need are some 4x4 lumber pieces, a drill, and galvanized screws - get cutting! When creating your basic seesaw you will require cutting out vertical supports from 4x4 lumber pieces and then drilling 1" pilot holes through them before attaching your wooden plank on top with galvanized screws for optimal results.
Build the Vertical Supports
Seesaws and their smaller cousin, teeter-totters, are essential playground equipment for kids as they enable them to develop balance and coordination while at the same time burning calories and building strength and endurance.
Seesaw play also helps children grasp the concept of torque - that force that pushes one end of a plank up when another end comes down. Children can experiment with this by balancing a plank on bricks and seeing how pushing down on one side causes its counterpart end to rise.
Playing on a seesaw promotes cooperation and communication between children. To make the equipment function, children must coordinate their movements and take turns, learning how to coordinate with friends as well as negotiate any disputes they might encounter between peers and establishing respect for all parties involved.