Hort Park: the new kid on the block

Apparently, Hort Park has been around for a while but not many knows about it until the recent launch and publicity. Whatever it is, I love its newness, its tidiness and its cleanliness. Most of all, its my new found play ground! There's so much for the kids to enjoy, they don't have to be nature lovers, there's so many features in the park that you can use to entice their natural desire to play and explore.

Actually, the park has put in a lot of playground equipment in its enclosure to appeal to the kids. May be they are doing so with an intention to provide additional incentives for them to visit and hopefully appreciate the beautifully landscpaed park and develop an interest in horticulture. Whatever the reason, these play grounds equipment were certainly well selected and provided our children in Singapore with yet another wonderful place to develop themselves through a meaningful occupation. My next blog will share with you some features of these equipments at Hort Park but meanwhile, I'd like to explore how else our children may enjoy the other features of the park...

There are many such small pieces of landscaped gardens in Hort Park, showcasing the efforts of various companies and organisations. As you walk your children through these little gardens, encourage them to explore the different texture of the ground, the grass, the pebbles, the leaves (dead and alive). They may want to jump from stepping stone to stepping stone and indeed, if you look below, you can see that there are various shapes and sizes and distances between stones to challenge your childs motor skills and spatial (space) awareness.

I was really quite excited to see the variety of textures that the children would be able to walk/jump/run/gallop/hop/sit/crawl on in one given setting. There's wood, there's the usual wild grass (you know what I mean?), the well-kept carpet grass, the synthetic grass, pebbles of different sizes, man made "stones", sand, road, foam and so on. There are also steps of different width and slopes of different gradients, all within a few steps of each other. Where else can you find such a well equip gym??

Go to Hort Park one of these days, it's worth the trip, if nothing, it's beauty will surely unwind your soul. BTW, there's not much shade, so choose a cloudy day or not so warm part of the day.

Jacob Ballas Children's Garden

There was so much talk about the new Jacob Ballas Children's Garden at the Botanic Gardens I thought I should really bring the kids. Coincidentally their school took them for an excursion there and I followed along. Subsequently I decided to bring them there again as I felt the Garden has much to offer and the kids hadn't had enough of it!!!

The tree house playground is really kind of the highlight of the small Garden if you are there on a free and easy trip by yourself. Otherwise the Garden offers many educational tours, check out: http://www.sbg.org.sg/education/workshopchi.asp

As for the tree house playground, the children get to climb up to platforms which were build around the tree trunks. There's the usual slides thoughtfully build at two levels so that kids who are not keen for the bigger challenge can start out on the lower one first. These slides are enclosed "tubes" and hence exposed the kids to a different kind of spatial and visual experience.


Set amongst the trees, this big"spider web" is fun for the kids to imagine themselves either as the spider or the prey that's stuck there. When more kids are together, you can throw in the idea and let them suggest the rules to the game. It could be just a simple game of tag or an elaborate story with many plots.

There are the lower and smaller webs that children can practice their climbing skills first before attempting this big web.


Other than the webs and the regular steps that lead up to the platform, wooden ladders like these provide the children yet another way to get up. Make sure the kids try out the different ways!

There are many other features in the garden that provide for a huge variety of sensory experiences in nature's way. There's a fallen tree trunk laid across a mini river that can challenge the child's sense of balance and depth; there's a suspension bridge for movement and view, there's lots of leaves, flowers and pebbles and twigs and branches for touching and smelling, and you can even walk behind a water fall for that auditory experience. There's also another playground with merry go rounds and climbing features build on sand. There's even a sand digger on this playground. To top the list, there's a water feature area where children can play with water sprouting from the grounds and practise eye-hand coordination when filling up their watering cans! Last but not least, there's a maze made of bushes to test your child's sense of direction.