Another trip to our local obstacle course, CTC Obstacles. What a great place for kids of all ages, even for the adults who bring them! Disclaimer: Most adults come prepared to sit and wait, and the other kids we brought came prepared to hate it, so did 🙂 )
The catchphrase I’ve been hearing lately is ‘soft play’. Let the kids go do whatever they want in the safety of their injury-free environment. I suggest medium to hard play for every child. If you jump out to the side too much on a zipline, you SHOULD smash into a post! (a padded post, but a post, none the less) Let them bang into things – on the rare occasions it happens. He learned not to swing out to the side, she learned not to let her skin scrape across dry rubber too hard)
She might get hurt if she falls off that slanted wall…so she better hold on.
another visit to CTC Obstacles 🙂 what an awesome place, they love it here! we were excited to see how much bigger it was, but ugh, there were children EVERYwhere…maybe it was because it was a rainy first weekend of summer.
however, the kids are all given a 'safety walkthrough' beforehand and are pretty good at avoiding each other and waiting turns and cool with accidental line-cutters…they all seem to get it 🙂 (there are also some employee 'floaters' moving around keeping an eye on the flow of things, it's well organized in that way)
their favourite part was the zip-line for sure!
there is still a lot of obstacles there they can't do yet, we'll be back!
they said the three year old was free even though she was using more stuff than some of the older kids 😀
recommendation: have your kids take as few breaks as possible, they can either be exhausted after 90 mins or bummed that 90 mins is over 🙂
Posted by Unschooldays on Sunday, June 24, 2018
The amount of energy the kids have is amazing. What’s also amazing is how people will go somewhere like this, for the exact same amount of time, and wait.
There were a ton of kids there this time, I imagine due to it being a rainy first week of summer vacation, but it was better than most situations being surrounded by released-schoolchildren (like going to a reptile show, for example)…they came to burn energy and there were a thousand ways to do it. Very little line-waiting…but the line-waiting doubled as their little cooldown breaks in between some pretty intense activity. As intense as anyone wanted to make it.
I was able to coach the brand new six year old how to run further up the ramps with two simple relatable pieces of knowledge. They are just like running up a skate bowl, and big strides compared to little strides are what he was looking for.
What I enjoyed the most was them not asking me the way they should do a new line. They watched older kids do it and then tried it themselves.
