Transforming the horse paddock: a nature play space for Widgee State School
The Widgee State School horse paddock project is one that we can’t wait to watch evolve. A great joy of our work as landscape architects is helping schools create nature play spaces that have a long term impact on the entire school community. If you’d like to explore incorporating nature play in your school, please reach out. We’d love to meet with you.
For decades, the old horse paddock at Widgee State School was a largely neglected, unattractive space that offered little play and learning value to students and staff. Now, thanks to some clever Orterra design, it’s a much loved and highly valued space for outdoor learning and nature play, resulting in significant positive impacts on the entire school community.
Designing Widgee State School’s ‘old horse paddock’ into an inspiring learning and play environment was a fun and transformational project for the Orterra team. We were approached by Acting Principal Amelia Olsen in 2021 to give this rural school of 55 students a landscape framework and a child-led design that the students and teachers could bring to life themselves through a shared vision.
Inspired by ‘Fridays with Mr Andrews’ where an early years teacher took classes to the horse paddock to play, the revamped horse paddock design embraced the natural features in existence, namely a yabbie filled creek, towering gums and vast expanses of grass. The school leadership team had a list of ideas, but wanted expert support to both prioritise existing ideas as well as share all of the possibilities of the space. In many ways, we were starting with a blank slate— the space had never been used for anything other than tethering horses!
The horse paddock project is a bit different to many of our projects because there’s not a lot of ‘before and after’ to show in the context of infrastructure and plant lists. However, the leadership team has received wonderful feedback from the community as well as from school families. Importantly, teachers are observing positive changes in student behaviour and reduced conflict as children learn how to ‘work’ with their peers. Teaching staff have witnessed significant ‘before and after’ changes in their teaching and of their students’ behaviour. The majority of teaching now happens outdoors, and through nature play children are demonstrating a vast range of functional skills, including:
- Empathy
- Problem solving
- Negotiating
- Cooperating
- Communicating; and
- Innovating.
Anyone who has spent time in nature knows that its wildness can present challenges, which isn’t always a negative. When challenges are experienced in the context of learning, even when people don’t know that they’re being taught a lesson, the impact is profound. The horse paddock is a place to take risks and to be unafraid of failing. Children build stick bridges, create yabbie traps, make roads, draw maps and dig ponds. Sometimes, what they build collapses or sinks or simply doesn’t work. This is how children figure things out, reflect on the why and how, and try new ways of doing things. This is a process that builds grit and resilience through exploring and experimenting. When it’s in a social context it becomes a shared experience, and this in turn enables and facilitates learning beyond the horse paddock.
The horse paddock transformation has an impact beyond that of staff and students. There’s an environmental impact where children are being taught how to care for the environment and be good custodians. The school is excited for a next step: creating frog ponds, where students will be involved in constructing the ponds and planting out a frog-friendly garden, as well as learning how to care for that ecosystem, count frog species and watch the lifecycle of frogs in real time, in a real environment.