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Children don't spend much time outdoors anymore, and research demonstrates that missed outdoor time negatively affects children's physical and mental health. At the Y, we aim to give children at least a full 60 minutes of outdoor play daily, and you can help by building our outdoor classroom!
Our not-for-profit early learning center, the Center for Children and Families, located in Bloomington, Indiana, is licensed to educate and care for 112 young children daily while their parents or caregivers work.
Our YMCA has been in business for more than 30 years, but our early learning center opened only a year ago. When our capital funds were used up, we still hadn't finished our outdoor classroom-- that's where you come in!
Funders will help us purchase natural outdoor building blocks for children, including a storage shed to ensure that they last for many, many years.
Your donation will give hundreds and hundreds of children over many years access to materials that build creativity, build muscles and bring children out into nature on a daily basis.
Play, and outdoor play especially, IS the work of children. You can help them experience it more fully.
What You're Funding:
Your donation will fund a preschool set of Outlast Blocks and a storage shed from Community Playthings: http://www.communityplaythings.com/products/outdoor/outlast-sets
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These specially designed blocks are meant to last for years and years in an outdoor environment while giving children the opportunity to build, and then physically interact with their structures.
We plan to purchase the:
- Outlast Shed
- Wheelbarrow
- Crates
- Preschool Block Set
If we are unable to raise our full amount, we will use what we raise to purchase the pieces that we can afford outside of the full set.
The Impact:
Rachel Carson, "A Sense of Wonder"
"Play, incorporating animistic and magical thinking is important because it:
-fosters the healthy, creative and emotional growth of a child;
-forms the best foundation for later intellectual growth;
-provides a way in which children get to know the world and creates possibilities for different ways of responding to it.
-fosters empathy and wonder."
Valerie Andrews, A Passion for this Earth
"As a child, one has that magical capacity to move among the many eras of the earth; to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen un-self-consciously to the soughing of the trees."
They include:
- allowing children to be children
- fostering a positive disposition towards the outdoors
- increasing physical and mental health
- improving creativity and imagination
- exploring, risk-taking and much, much more!
Other Ways You Can Help
Can't donate? You can still help! Please share our campaign with your friends and family who remember the joys of outdoor play! Together we can make a difference for children! Use the Indiegogo share tools-- it's easy!
As always, thank you for your support!
