"Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how." -John Holt

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Sprinkler fun @Shedd Park

Before I begin, let it be known all these pics were taken on the crappy Sony with a big smudge in the center of the lens, apparently left by some rugrat who used the camera last. I wouldn't even post these if it weren't for all my homies who want to live vicariously through me rather than step foot in Lowell. ;)So the good things... it's free, it's cool, it's an $850,000 new addition that doesn't exist elsewhere nearby...There's a wicked cool playground too. All sorts of things we haven't seen before. (And we've seen LOTS of playgrounds...)
This benign-looking seat actually spun using your own weight as momentum. It was more than I could take but uber fun nonetheless.But the bad things... no shade in the sprinkler zone, the picnic table area was trashed and hadn't been swept in weeks, open trash cans gave off less-than favorable odors and a quick peek into the bathroom featuring a smear of baby poo in the entrance may have turned us off Shedd Park for future visits. Shame that none of the $850,000 didn't go towards maintenance. :(

Posted by Jessica at 10:41 PM

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm at Shedd a lot and I just thought it'd be fair to mention that the park is indeed cleaned daily. I'm there in the 9-10am hour (after dropping my older kids off at a nearby school) and I see the cleaning crew doing their thing. When I return in the 3-5p timeframe, the place is a mess. The problem is that some of the people who go there are inconsiderate slobs. In the lunch hour over the weekend, I watched one family push their McD's trash off the end of a picnic table and kick it underneath. We put in a dozen trash cans and some people are still too lazy or filthy to walk the extra 20 feet to dispose of trash appropriately.

And we're glad you enjoyed the playground. Its design was guided by a number of parents who also visit LOTS of playgrounds and wanted something new and challenging.

10:09 PM

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"By nature people are learning animals. Birds fly; fish swim; humans think and learn. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do - and all we need to do - is to give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for, listen respectfully when they feel like talking, and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest."
John Holt
"In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it...and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself." -Grace Llewellyn
"What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child."
George Bernard Shaw
Real, natural learning is in the living. It's in the observing, the questioning, the examining, the pondering, the analyzing, the watching, the reading, the DO-ing, the living, the breathing, the loving, the JOY. It's in the joy. ~Anne Ohman
"How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?" -Henry D. Thoreau