Bishan Park Part 3 - Climbing

This type of climbing fixtures offers great challenges to a child's praxic ability. This jargon term involves the whole process of coming up with an idea of what to do with this piece of equipment, planning each and every step as to how to make this idea work and then motorically (i.e. physically) executing it (i.e. make it happen!).

The idea can be as simple as "I want to climb up to the top!". The process: "What do I have to do? ummm... put my right hand on this rope, and my left hand on this other side, pull myself up and quickly put my legs here...." and so on and so forth. For most of us, really, this happens at a subconscious level, but I am sure we all agree that it had to happen. Then we use our muscles, which must be strong and flexible and under our control to make our plan happen.

Challenge your child to think of more complicated ways of playing with this equipment. How about climbing up on one side and going down the other? How about climbing into this square hole and coming out the other?

For those not so motivated to climb, bring along some clothes pegs or favourite character stickers, and have your kids play hero rescuing the poor Dora who was stuck up in the mountain /castle etc.

For those who want to offer their six years old a lesson on grids, you can name them A to D across the horizontal and 1 to 6 up the vertical and play a game of "Where am I?"!



These are other parts of this playground fixture at Bishan park which I will briefly talk about in this post. Although not terribly exciting, I do appreciate playgrounds that have more than one means of climbing up to the platform than just the plain old steps. Different height of steps, different width and depth of steps and different types of rails and grips that they may used to aid themselves to get up there, all offer the young toddler different challenges and hence more brain connections!



These steps just further emphasize my previous point. It's great, the younger kids can get on all fours to climb up and as they get better, challenge them to walk up using just one hand to help, and then, without using their hands. Lots of planning required to go from the last step and under the blue barrier! Getting them to transport pots of sand up and down these structures would keep them occupied the whole time while you are assured that their body and brain are being developed every of those minutes.