Perth Voice Interactive

IT’S taken lots of olives but the first stage of North Perth primary school’s nature playground has been built.

The cash was raised thanks to schoolkids who picked clean the trees of willing locals who donated their fruit, along with a $2000 grant from Vincent council.

The 52-metre disused area has been transformed into a natural-style playground with tunnels, balance logs, stepping stones and bamboo to weave through.

Sonia Hills from the P&C says inspiration came from a presentation by Natureplay WA’s Griffin Longley and UK childhood expert Tim Gill. The idea behind nature play is to get kids out of sanitised plastic playgrounds and let them have some unstructured play, use imaginations, and maybe even scrape some knees and get a bit dirty.

Within two minutes of being let loose on the new area, kids had reimagined logs as “a crocodile pit” containing treasure, and doom for any who fell.

For the next stage the P&C is hoping to install metal bin lids for kids to play drums on, so if anyone has some spare old bins lying around get in touch at nppspresident@gmail.com

by DAVID BELL.