Volume 2, No. 15. August 9, 2002
Powerful
play
This world has two places where you can be the veterinarian, zoo director, keeper
and lemur all at once: in your imagination, and in the Hamill Family Play Zoo,
a free play complex at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, Illinois. Opened in June,
2001, the Play Zoo takes the successful free play models of children's museums
and gives it a zoo setting. Brookfield’s is the zoo industry’s first
such Play complex; surely, more will follow.
Few community outreach programs can accomplish what the Play Zoo has. It engages
children in wildlife conservation by tapping into children's’ most abundant
resource: imagination. “At first glance you go, ‘Oh! It’s like
a children’s museum,’” said Dave Becker, manager of play programming
who came to the Hamill Family Play Zoo staff in December after working at the
DuPage Children’s Museum. “But it’s very different. It’s
not about the relationship of a child with an exhibit; this is more about a
caring relationship between the child and the natural world around them. Here
visitors interact with real things." They growing real food in the greenhouse.
They dig sod used in the armadillo enrichment program. They interact with real
animals.”
The Play Zoo has 80 species in all, mostly birds, reptiles and amphibians, animals
that kids can have relationships with outside the zoo. One corner is devoted
to a ring-tailed lemur exhibit, where children can either dress up as keepers
or as lemurs themselves alongside a glass wall through which the lemurs watch
with equal interest.
The veterinary clinic offers a balance of real (X-rays of a frog, a rattlesnake,
a penguin with an egg, an owl with a splint) and pretend (shelves of stuffed
animals). “Some kids spend all their time in the hospital,” Becker
said. “One kid, Zachary, brings his stuffed alligator from home for his
weekly check up. And some kids won’t get out of the greenhouse.” No
wonder: on “Spritzing Day,” face-painted kids are spraying the plants,
while one girl trowels out a hole for a new plant.
When Keith Winsten arrived at Brookfield 4 1/2 years ago as curator of education,
planning for the project had already begun. “Driving the mission was, what
can we do for kids to help them grow up to be adults who care about animals,”
he said. “Can we promote nature plus provide experiences for the kids and
a model for parents, showing them the importance of nature in children’s
lives?”
Fundamental to carrying out the play zoo’s message is that none of the
play is organized, outside the storytelling sessions and crafts workshops. The
Play Zoo’s workers—five full-time, three part-time, eight seasonal
employees and about 60 volunteers—are on hand to play with children, not
lecture. Along those lines, the two-acre outdoor area includes faux animal pens
and a little stream cascading down a rocky bed that children can walk through.
“There’s a whole generation of kids who don’t play outside,”
Winsten said. “I’ve heard parents say ‘I’ve got to set up
an animal hospital at home,’ and that’s letting the child practice
care.”
Winsten and the Brookfield Zoo planners drew on the appropriate experts: child
psychologists, landscape architects, play structure builders and, perhaps most
important of all, the Kids Council, a dozen children between 5 and 10 years
old. “They give you ideas, and they give you a gut check on ideas,”
Winsten said. Like the idea to turn one of the Play Zoo’s rooms into a
zoo director’s office, complete with desk, fake computer, phone and a table
where children can design their own zoo. “We thought it would be a real
failure,” Winsten said. The Kids Council backed it, though, and the Play
Zoo has not lacked for candidates wishing to be zoo director.
Perhaps Brookfield has stumbled onto a great recruiting tool, too.
212.265.0043
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