Types of Indoor Playground Equipment
Indoor Playground Equipment provides a safe and fun way for kids to play and learn. Choose from a range of padded buildings and barriers designed to promote balance, strength and creativity in children.
Adding educational games to these structures gives children an extra learning bonus. For example, they can practice their math skills while navigating through a tunnel.
Naturalistic Elements
With a growing awareness of environmental preservation, it’s a popular societal trend for indoor commercial playground equipment to mimic natural elements. Rubber rocks and boulders to climb over, plastic caves to hide in and tree trunks to crawl through are all common features on these types of playgrounds. This helps bring the outdoors inside and can be a great way to attract parents who want their kids to get outside of their iPads, video games and televisions.
Incorporating nature-themed equipment into a commercial playground helps create an immersive experience for children that promotes physical exercise and the sense of discovery. Nature-themed equipment resembles the colors, textures and features of the surrounding environment, encouraging children to explore the area while engaging in social interactions with their peers and caregivers. These structures also encourage creative play and help children develop problem-solving skills.
Inclusive playgrounds include a range of different play components to appeal to all types of children, regardless of their age and ability. This type of equipment includes musical elements to engage children with auditory learning styles, recognizable objects to stimulate imagination and solitary play for kids who might need a place to escape from the crowds. Loose parts play pieces, such as stepping logs and timber Tepees, are also commonly included in inclusive playgrounds as they offer children the opportunity to assess risks and make their own decisions during unstructured play.
Sensory Play
Kids need to touch, see, smell, and hear to learn about their toys and their environment. Sensory play provides opportunities to stimulate these five primary senses, plus three lesser-known sensory systems: vestibular (our balance sense), proprioceptive (our internal sense of our body’s position in space), and interoception (our sense of our internal state).
Incorporating a soft indoor playground into your business attracts families with children. This helps you build a regular customer base that boosts your revenue, especially if you encourage Indoor Playground Equipment kids’ caretakers to return for the soft playground with their charges. You can also market the soft playground as an additional attraction by hosting events like parents’ meet-ups and child development workshops that bring in more people, helping you expand your customer base.
Kids of all ages and abilities enjoy sensory play, whether they have special needs or not. However, there’s a special need to offer sensory play spaces that are specifically designed for kids who struggle with certain areas of their development. These play spaces are referred to as “sensory gyms,” and they’re intended to help these kids feel comfortable playing with other children in an environment that is safer and more accommodating to their unique needs. These spaces are often filled with bright colors, equipment that encourages interaction, and specialized materials that provide just-right stimulation.
Dinosaur Fossil Digging
Dinosaur fossil digging provides an exciting sensory experience for toddlers and helps develop fine motor skills. Toddlers use their fingers to sift through the dirt, revealing dinosaur bones, teeth and footprints. This activity is also an excellent way to teach dinosaurs and encourage imagination and storytelling. To enhance the dig, place a few dinosaur books near the play area and read them with children before and after they explore.
Once a dinosaur dies, it quickly gets covered in sediment such as mud, sand or volcanic ash to protect it from scavenging animals and natural erosion. The sediment slowly replaces the dinosaur’s tissues with minerals, which creates a fossil. Over time, a fossil may eventually break apart. Countless dinosaurs disappeared this way before paleontologists discovered them.
To set up a dinosaur fossil dig, place taste-safe dirt in a bin or large bucket and add some plastic plants or trees to the mix for a lush environment that dinosaurs might have roamed. You can even add a small volcano for added interest! Then, bury some plastic indoor play structure dinosaurs in the dirt and let the kids dig for their prehistoric treasure. To help them feel like real paleontologists, provide them with a few digging tools and a notebook and pencil for recording their discoveries. To make the activity more challenging, you can hide the dinosaurs deeper in the sand or make them harder to find.
Large Structures
One of the most popular types of playground equipment is slides, which can be found in indoor play spaces in a variety of forms and sizes. These structures are fun and challenging, and they help kids to develop their upper body strength and coordination. They can also help to improve their spatial orientation skills and hand-eye coordination.
Other large structure options for an indoor playground include climbing structures that look like trees, rocks, or other natural elements. These can be a great way to get kids outdoors in the winter, when it’s too cold for outdoor play. They can also be used to promote healthy lifestyles, by encouraging kids to climb and exercise.
Climbing equipment can also be beneficial for children’s mental health, as it promotes social interaction amongst kids of different ages. During play, kids of different ages will often copy or learn from each other, and older kids may help younger ones by boosting them up on the climbable structures, helping them onto or off the equipment, and encouraging them not to be scared.
Indoor play structures can be a great addition to any gathering friendly space, whether it’s a restaurant, daycare, or other commercial venture. They can provide an extra reason for families to visit, and they can also act as a welcome break on long road trips.