Temporary Water Walls

A few years ago, I visited a school that had a beautiful water play structure built onto it's playground. Made from shiny aluminum, it featured a number of curving troughs into which children could pour water and let it flow. My first instinct was envy. I later visited another school with a similar installation, although this one also had a more vertical surface down which water could be poured, featuring funnels and a water wheel. 

The thing is, on the days I visited, I was the only one who played with them, the kids being busy with attempting to balance their way across a low brick wall or kicking balls, leaving these wonderful, permanent structures untouched. By the time I was done touring schools, I'd become less enthusiastic about these apparatuses, not because they weren't cool, but because they were exactly the kind of one-trick-ponies that are a rage for a day or a week, but then lose their play value for long stretches of time until there are new kids (or visiting adults, like me) show up to take lessons from them.

I've grown wary of permanent installations at the school because, especially if they're nice and shiny and requiring of budget and/or manpower to construct because I've found that the play-spaces that work best for us are ones capable of continual evolution.

We've now built 3 or 4 water walls since I first learned of the concept a couple years ago, making ours from 2-liter pop bottle parts, lengths of blue flexible tubing from the hardware store and zip ties. It's the kind of project that can be managed by preschoolers with a couple supportive adults around to help out.  We built a new one last week, employing the frame we'd built a few years ago from the sides of an old Ikea shelf to which we nailed a piece of peg board. The kids added a few more nails to make sure the thing was solid, then got to work planning the paths along which they wanted to water to flow.

Managed by a couple parent-teachers, the project took shape fairly quickly once we'd put the hammers away, growing to include at least a dozen kids in the process.

I'd set up the new outdoor sensory table nearby as a water supply for "testing" as we went.

For the entire morning we built and poured, built and poured, making a muddy business of the area around our workbench.

My idea was that once we'd built it, we could move it into the sand pit, near the cast iron hand pump, which is what we did on the following day, working together to carry it to the top of the outdoor classroom, then shoving the legs of our step ladders into the sand.

Which is where it stood, virtually ignored for the next two days.

The kids, it seems, have already learned what they needed to from it. I'll let it ride through this week. Maybe we'll decide we need to add to it. But whatever happens, I'll eventually cut all those zip ties with a knife and we'll reclaim that play-space real estate, sooner or later, for something else.

But it sure was fun while it lasted.

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