The Great Parkpalooza

Beg, Borrow and Steal.  I’m good at it.  I KNEW that the kidlets were going to love the idea of a Parkpalooza as soon as my friend Mel started talking about it when we were visiting a few weeks ago.  As she was talking, I immediately thought of about six different applications of this terrific idea, but we started with parks, just like Mel and her kids did.  At lunch last Friday  I introduced the idea of spending the afternoon visiting different playgrounds  and voting on which playground we liked best.  We talked about which playgrounds we wanted to visit, and decided that we wanted them to be on the East side of town so that we didn’t have to drive too far in between places.  The kidlets came up with five great places, some at parks and some at other schools that they don’t go to.  Then we talked about how we could do some secret ballot voting, and came up with the system of giving each place a star rating and then compiling the results to make a graph to see which playground rated the highest.

After nap we set off!  We decided that 20 minutes was a good amount of time to spend at each place, and designated a time keeper to keep track of when we arrived and should be leaving.  When it was time to leave the first playground Mr. Trouble on Feet threw a temper tantrum, but after the next playground he caught on that we were getting in the car to go to MORE playgrounds, and he was all for it!

It took about as long to drive between each place as we spent actually playing.  (The time keeper was a bit biased and gave playgrounds that she thought were especially fun a bit more time than some of the others.)  Even so, it took from 4:00 to nearly 8:00 to visit all the places and arrive back home.  Everyone voted.  Mr. SP used his fantastic math skills to add up the stars for each playground.  YaYa carefully put a dot in each square of the graph correlating to the number of stars, and The Banana colored the graph. It was very interesting to see how each person voted and learn about the criteria they used.

I voted too.  YaYa asked, “What, did you evaluate the benches at each place and decide which was the most comfortable, or what?”  Ha.  Ha.  Actually, I laughed uproarously when she said that.

Dr. Peds was really surprised at the winning playground, which won by a large margin.

It was a great way to spend a beautiful sunny afternoon.  There was minimal squabbling, and most of it happened in the car, of course.  I don’t think I would have been aware of the uniqueness of each place had we not visited them consecutively.  It was neat to see how there was something really special about each of the playgrounds.