Bethune's P.L.A.C.E. - A New Kind of Playground

[Cynthia Gentry]

There's a brand new kind of playground coming to the Bethune Elementary School in Atlanta. It's called Bethune's P.L.A.C.E. and that stands for Playground - Learning Arboretum + Center for Exploration. Children need to be outside during the day and the Bethune students will have a reason to go out for recess, science, math, and art classes, and more. The playground is surrounded by a fruit and nut tree arboretum, a vegetable garden, rain garden, a bio-retention pond, a learning path, a quiet area, a learning path, and an enormous open field for free play.

The first thing we did at Bethune was to get the children to let us know what their idea of a perfect playground looked like. Their pictures were beautiful AND gave us a lot of great ideas.

They were pretty excited about the whole thing.

We gave the playground rep our ideas and he came up with and awesome design.

Just to make sure we had what the students wanted we held an election day and they voted for their favorite pieces of equipment. We had the drawings changed to match the children's wishes. And, you know what? They were right! It made it much better.

Here is a Google Earth shot of Bethune. You can see just how much this playground in needed.

We are ALL very excited about this new play-arboretum-learning center. It will be awesome!