Field Trip Worksheet: “Why is it Magical?”

In the context of Magical Bridge Playgrounds, the word magical has come to mean much more than its conventional definitions. 

For those of us that spend time thinking about how playgrounds can be places where everyone can play together (including those with alternate abilities), the word magical takes on its conventional meanings and more. 

 It’s magical when you see mindful designed playground features that have been selected and installed for the public to use. 

We highly recommend visiting a Magical Bridge Playground  for field trips.  Your students will love playing there and by adding this investigation for how playgrounds can meet the needs of all ages and abilities you can make your feild trip an opportunity to have your students start conversations about inclusision and universal design. 

If you are planning an educational field trip to a Magical Bridge Playground, you can prepare your students with some of our suggested pre-field trip activities, or they can come to the playground with no advanced preparation and they can draw upon their own knowledge and imagination to sleuth why the equipment is magical.

Back in the classroom or at another time when you have your students’ attention, you can have a sparked discussion with your students to hear what they came up with and you can interject some more ideas for them to think about. We invite you to use this presentation deck to help prompt the discussion.

It can be useful and insightful to have your students be playground detectives at a playground at their school or in their community see where the magic happens or doesn’t happen at that particular playground. 

Even if you can’t take a field trip to a Magical Bridge Playground at this time, there are a number of resources that you can use to simulate a virtual field trip. We have created a page several videos of Magical Bridge Playgrounds  whicch includes links to both videos produced by Magical Bridge Foundation and those done by creators in the Magical Bridge Community.

We hope you enjoy this activity. We love hearing what people who use these activities come up with, so if you want to share some of what your students come up with, feel free to use this form. Though we have some insights for instances where playgrounds are magical, we are constantly surprised to hear of new ways that playgrounds can be magical. We have prepared this form for you to share your field trip experiences with us. So feel free to share with us and we will do our best to respond.

Note: It’s hard for us to not be biased about Magical Bridge Playgrounds, so we won’t pretend that we are not. We love Magical Bridge Playgrounds and though we are separate from Magical Bridge Foundation, we have received financial support from the foundation for our work and we have done many collaborations with Magical Bridge Playgrounds over the years. So we owe it to the educators that are exploring using these activities to know that we are huge fans of Magical Bridge Playgrounds.