Blog

While children (and parents!) may find the new mask rules for children challenging, Nature Play WA has some tips on supporting your child in wearing a mask, and how to help them decompress and wind down when the day at school is over, and the mask comes off.  With Western Australia moving to Level 2 […]

The great Western Australian dream of owning a backyard so vast that your kids stub their toes on the push-mower you lost to the weeds three summers ago while fielding their sister’s cover drive is, let’s just face it, over. The quarter-acre block is dead, and backyards are shrinking faster than a Twisties packet in […]

Over the years we’ve put together collections of our favourite nature-based crafts, activities and gift ideas for the Christmas season. We’ve curated them here, in one place, for you to discover!   Merry and Bright – Christmas Nature Crafts Minimal materials are needed for these projects – as long as you have some paint or […]

Book Week is always an exciting time of year – a time when we, as adults, remember the joy our favourite childhood books gave us, and when our children surprise us with their choice of costume – Halibut Jackson? Really? For 2021 the Childrens’ Book Council of Australia have chosen the theme of – Old […]

Aboriginal art workshop at Nature Play WA and City of Gosnells’ International Play Day event with Urban Indigenous It is National Reconciliation Week and I would like to reflect on what I think it means for the children in our community. I will begin with my own lived experience, which, as a non-Aboriginal Australian, places very real limitations on […]

“It’s cold!” “I’m tired!” “My socks/pants/sleeves are wet!” Ah, the melodious call of the Western Australian Summer-Born Child when the temperature drops below 25 degrees and the cloudy sky has the audacity to release a sprinkling of water. All three of my kids were born in the dry, baking heat that our Summers are famous […]

Trying to define play is like trying to catch the sky in a jar. You might get a piece, but it will only ever be a reduction of the greater meaning you already hold. Because play, like love, is inextricable from human experience and it exists, and acts, before and beyond words. Which is all […]

Adventure is at your doorstep. On any given weekend you can walk out of the city with a pack on your back and a map in your pocket and follow one of WA’s amazing trails into one of the world’s great wildernesses. And there is no better time to do it than in the glorious Noongar […]

You know it’s summer because you are driving with oven mitts on. Also, you have moved your houseplants 1.5metres back from the window, and somewhere deep in the back of your mind Noel Coward is singing “only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun”. Yes, it is hot. Yes, it is getting […]

About now, we’d normally be gearing up for 4,000 cubby builders to descend on Yanchep National Park and transform a tranquil patch of grass into the shanty citadel that is Cubby Town. Our friends at Yanchep National Park would be making great piles of branches they’d collected over six-months, we’d be arranging for truckloads of […]