Adventure Play at the Parish School is an

adventure playground An adventure playground is a specific type of playground for children. Adventure playgrounds can take many forms, ranging from "natural playgrounds" to "junk playgrounds", and are typically defined by an ethos of unrestricted play, the presence ...

located in

Houston Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 in ...

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...

. The Adventure Playground at

The Parish School The Parish School is a private, non-profit school located in Houston, Texas, United States. It is adjacent to the Spring Branch district.

consists of a three-acre play-area open to children between the ages of 6 and 12 years old. It is one of the few junk playgrounds located in the United States, and the only one located in a school. The playground serves children with communication disorders and language and learning differences, often including difficulties interacting with peers.The Parish School adventure playground is the only Adventure playground in the United States that specifically serves children with communication and learning differences, such as auditory and other sensory processing differences, autism spectrum differences, Attention deficit hyperactivity,

dyslexia Dyslexia, also known until the 1960s as word blindness, is a disorder characterized by reading below the expected level for one's age. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, r ...

dysgraphia Dysgraphia is a learning disability of written expression, which affects the ability to write, primarily handwriting, but also coherence. It is a specific learning disability (SLD) as well as a transcription disability, meaning that it is a wri ...

, or Childhood apraxia of speech. See

Adventure playground

The

Adventure playground An adventure playground is a specific type of playground for children. Adventure playgrounds can take many forms, ranging from "natural playgrounds" to "junk playgrounds", and are typically defined by an ethos of unrestricted play, the presence ...

at the Parish School was started in 2008 with a sand-pile and two cement culverts. The three-acre play-area now contains a zip-line, shade structures, and an expanse of grassy floodplain, with natural features (dirt, grass, sticks), wildlife, and various scavenged construction materials, other recyclables, lumber, pipes, fabric and rope. Children also have access to tools (hammers and nails, hand drills and saws, shovels and post-hole diggers) for building structures out of recycled building materials. Many of these materials are collected from the Building Materials Reuse Warehouse, a part of the City of Houston's Solid Waste Management Department. The Adventure Playground at the Parish School is staffed by

playwork Playwork is the work of creating and maintaining spaces for children to play. The theory and practice of playwork recognises that children's play should ideally be "freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated." It is the job of ...

ers.

Research site

The Adventure Playground at the Parish School has been the site of several academic studies. These have concerned landscape design and comparisons of injury rates between conventional adult-designed-and-built playgrounds and child-designed-and-built junk playgrounds, or risky playgrounds. For example, comparing injury rates between two playground types, Wood and Leichter-Saxby (2016) found that the location with the fewest incidents was the child-built adventure playground. In a statistical study of risky play at the Parish School, which compared injury rates there to other activities, Leichter-Saxby and Wood (2018) found that play on the school's adventure playground was slightly riskier than

snooker Snooker (pronounced , ) is a cue sports, cue sport played on a Billiard table#Snooker and English billiards tables, rectangular table covered with a green cloth called baize, with six Billiard table#Pockets 2, pockets, one at each corner and o ...

and safer than

table tennis Table tennis, also known as ping-pong and whiff-whaff, is a sport in which two or four players hit a lightweight ball, also known as the ping-pong ball, back and forth across a table using small solid rackets. It takes place on a hard table div ...

. Playing on conventional fixed equipment at school recess was riskier than golf, but safer than being at home. Adventure play was safer than play on conventional playground equipment, but each carried an extremely low risk of serious injury.

Notes

References

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External links

Adventure play at the Parish SchoolTour of The Parish School's Adventure Playground with Jill Wood in Houston, Texas.
Adventure playgrounds Parks in Houston