Physical activity is essential for all ages for preventing chronic illness and promoting mental health. Studies have even linked physical activity with improved academic performance.
With so many things competing for kids’ attention and keeping them sedentary—including screen time, increased academic time, and more—it’s important to encourage them to get more physically active. You can help by providing play areas that engage kids and inspire them to get moving.
A Place to Move
Playgrounds are useful tools for encouraging physical activity, strengthening bones, muscles, hearts, and lungs. Play at the playground can improve coordination, posture, flexibility, and balance too. And those are just the physical benefits—playgrounds also exercise kids’ imaginations, as well as helping to develop social and problem-solving skills.
Talk with your playground manufacturer about how to create a play area using evidence-based design to boost physical activity levels. All six elements of active play—balancing, brachiating/bilateral upper-body movement, climbing, swinging, sliding, and spinning—should be incorporated into your playground, helping to ensure a wide range of activities that promote total-body health.
And don’t forget that physical activity is important for everyone, including kids with physical, cognitive, developmental, and sensory disabilities. Your playground should include room for everyone to get active.
Time to Get Active
Programming can also help, especially at playgrounds located on school grounds, at day camps, in childcare facilities and beyond. Playground activities should be developed using evidence-based standards. One company worked with SHAPE America, the nonprofit responsible for developing the National Standards & Grade-Level Outcomes for K-12 Physical Education, to create a program that promotes physical fitness in a fun way using well-designed play environments, coupled with innovative playground learning opportunities. The program provides exercise ideas that align with the national standards, and because the activities are fun, they make physical education feel more like play than work.
For More Information
Play and Park Structures
800-727-1907
www.playandpark.com