What happened to childhood adventure?

For years, activities that were the foundation of childhood memories have been stripped away from our homes, schools and communities because of fear. Wild, fun and play such as tobogganing, road hockey, building & climbing in tree forts, neighbourhood biking and seemingly random forest play has all vanished.

WHAT IF…

These experiences were more than just play?? What if they were the building blocks of childhood development that nurture curiosity, grit, resilience and a strong sense of self assurance.

There’s a small group of wildly courageous adults who think these acts of play are actually critical to the health and wellbeing of our children/future.

These adults have done an insane amount of research to prove that play and more importantly risky play is foundational in childhood development. Not just fun times and fun memories but experiences that are needed to build, test and solidify the mental wellbeing of all children.   

Dr Mariana Brussoni, Megan Zeni and Lady Allen are just a few of the leaders and researchers behind this work. Check out these 10 guiding principles of RISKY PLAY.

10 Guiding

Principles of Risky Play

  • PLAY AT HEIGHTS

  • PLAY AT SPEEDS

  • PLAY WITH TOOLS

  • PLAY WITH GETTING LOST

  • PLAY WITH ELEMENTS

  • VICARIOUS PLAY

  • CONSTRUCTION PLAY

  • BREAKING THE RULES

  • ROUGH & TUMBLE PLAY

  • PLAY WITH IMPACT

Proof is in the pudding!

We have spent the last 4 years taking this research and building it into rich learning day to day at school. We’ve had great success designing opportunities to teach kids to play, so they can play to learn and learn to lead. After watching the impacts on our students we started to wonder how we can bring these experiences to the community so we can impact more children. Impacting more children ensures our financial viability and success for the future and beyond.

DESIGNING, TESTING AND DELIVERING RISKY PLAY SINCE 2020

70+ FULL TIME STUDENTS JK-GR8

10 FULL TIME EDUCATORS & LEADERS PASSIONATE ABOUT OUTDOOR LEARNING AND RISKY PLAY

70+ STUDENTS IN OUR 4 WEEK WILDERNESS PROGRAMS BRINGING RISKY PLAY TO PUBLIC AND HOME SCHOOL CHILDREN

10+ COMMUNITY EVENTS WITH OUR CAMPFIRE CHALLENGE

2000+ KIDS AND FAMILIES EXPLORED OUR CAMPFIRE CHALLENGE - BRINGING RISKY PLAY TO THE COMMUNITY AT LARGE.

Last year we launched our first kids experience to the community with our CAMPFIRE CHALLENGE - can you outsmart a s’more? This was a fire lighting challenge for kids and we were popping up at events all over Muskoka with great success. 

But how do we get more experiences to the community? We started looking around school and wondering where we could start and which parts of school could translate well. We noticed that our recess yard has 2 major components to it that our kids really love and thrive in - our mountain bike area and our construction scrapyard.

Hmmmm could these be the next community experience??

We have transformed these concepts into our next experience, THE YETI LAB. This is an experiential adventure playground where kids learn to navigate new experiences in our mountain bike learning features, explore new skills in our maker/bushcraft space and get to roll up their sleeves and get dirty in our construction scrapyard.

WELCOME TO THE YETI LAB ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND

A 30,000 sq ft outdoor play space for kids. We will be officially launching the physical space in June and will announce to the students at the upcoming merch party.

For any questions please reach out to Sheena at SRepath@MuskokaHighlandsAcademy.com

ADVENTURE AWAITS YOUR KIDS!