Search Results

Imaginative play fosters mental growth by creating opportunities for trying out new ideas, ways of thinking and problem solving. In pretend-play, children face a variety of problems which they will solve using important skills that they’ll use throughout their lives. Many of today’s games for children have rules and a defined beginning and end. There are increasingly fewer opportunities to develop a child’s imagination than in previous generations. A well-designed Jungle Gym can provide just such an opportunity. The child must decide where to start and how to play. The individual poles, swings, ropes and tyres which make up a jungle gym can become whole new worlds. With a bit of imagination, they become anything from castles to spaceships and everything in between. Once the location of the adventure has been decided, it’s back to the imagination to create players in the story and a plot. The Rustics Tarantula is specifically designed to provide multiple options for movement from one side to the other without ever touching the ground. This lack of an obvious start and end point gives children an opportunity for creative play, problem solving and negotiation with playmates in addition to the more obvious upper and lower body strength, gross motor and balance benefits. The Tarantula incorporates many different horizontal, vertical, angled and moving elements to provide multiple stimulants for the imagination • four giant arches • a tyre tunnel in the centre • twisty monkey bars of ascending and descending loops • a set of more traditional straight monkey bars • a three-meter-long slide • two fireman’s poles • three hanging ropes and • a giant spider’s web An investment in well-designed outdoor play equipment is an investment in both the physical and mental wellbeing of the children who use it.

Playground equipment, though a large once off cost, is an amazing investment. Consider the number of children who benefit from it every day over the lifetime of the equipment and it becomes very cost effective. For example if you order the Tarantula (pictured above): 100 grade 1’s can play on the equipment every day That’s 100 kids per day for 200 school days per year That’s 20,000 kid-days of entertainment over the course of one year. Multiply that by the lifetime of the equipment, which for the Tarantula is a minimum of 10 years, – that’s 200,000 kid-days The physical and mental health benefits of well-designed outdoor play equipment are worth a hundred times more than the per kid per day cost. Click this link to read our newsletter on the benefits.

Several East London schools use the unit as a base for their fitness programme. One school has a dedicated fitness period during which each child runs a pre-determined course over the Tarantula. But its not only for children - Check out this video by Redefining Strength to get some ideas of how to use your playground equipment to get a great full-body workout. Every playground is different, but these moves should help inspire you and provide you with ideas about how to use swings, slides, monkey bars and ladders to design a workout to suit your needs.

Rustics Jungle Gyms recently installed its Tarantula Playground System at Parklands Special school in East London. We asked Deputy Principal, Jeanette Kelly why she chose the Tarantula. She said, “We purchased the Tarantula Play System for our Autistic Unit. Gross motor activities are very important for their development and, after investigating all the options, the Tarantula was the best option. It is a very good price and it allows a good number of learners to use it simultaneously. “It is exactly what our learners need. They can hang, climb and balance all on one structure rather than having many loose standing structures, which is a big space saving. Jeanette adds, “Individual teachers take their learners to the Tarantula during gross motor periods and the Physiotherapists are using it for therapy with individual learners and with small groups, e.g. a group of learners with Cerebral Palsy.”

In 2009, Rustics Jungle Gyms installed a jungle gym at Active Eyes in East London. The centre uses a movement program and visual training program to assist learners with learning difficulties and as well as learners’ general academic and sporting performance. The aim was to encourage predominantly weight bearing activities to improve upper body strength and core muscle development in learners. According to Loryn Nel, “The activities that can be done on the Eye-X encourage focus and concentration as well as giving the learners a full strength ‘workout’. The improvement in body strength encourages good posture for writing and reading and the twisty monkey bars encourage midline crossing.

This is the most obvious use, but the benefits of simple play are far reaching - see previous blog posts for more information on the benefits of outdoor play. The Tarantula is specifically designed to provide multiple options for movement from one side to the other without ever touching the ground. There is no obvious start and end point which gives users an opportunity for creative play, problem solving and negotiation with playmates in addition to the more obvious upper and lower body strength, gross motor and balance benefits.

Want a Tarantula Jungle Gym but don’t have the funds? There are many ways to skin that cat! Here are a few that our internet research presented. If there’s nothing here that sparks an idea, do another search – there are hundreds of ideas out there and there is sure to be one that ignites the fire! Apply to the Sport & Recreation Sector of the National Lottery (https://www.nlcsa.org.za/sport-and-recreation/)/ They issue a list of priority funding areas each year which inform where funds will be directed to for that year. The sector is committed to “Provide sports and recreation facilities that are accessible to communities”. A Tarantula is a piece of sports equipment and fits neatly into this funding category. Applications are accepted throughout the year. Apply to a bank or other asset finance institution – The Tarantula can be marked with an asset number and can therefore be used as collateral against a loan supplied by your bank or other fund supplier. Criteria will depend on the institution, so give them a call and see if they are able to help Crowd Funding - Crowd fundin g is an internet-based financing method that involves getting many people to contribute a small amount each to fund a project. The key to success is finding a service provider who can help you formulate and enact an enticing campaign. An internet search will easily reveal local crowd funding service providers – look out for those with a charity section and international reach. US Dollars go a long way in South Africa! Hold events and activities to raise funds Host a team-based obstacle course or ‘Amazing Race’ type treasure hunt to get your community involved in your fund raising. This offers local businesses a great promotion opportunity. They will pay you to bring potential clients to their door and those that don’t offer a lo cation on the treasure hunt will pay for their employees to take part as a teambuilding exercise. Host a 5km fun run in your area. Join up with a local running club – they will know what is required by the local authority to make this happen legally and safely. Offer a branded item (T-shirt/bandana/water bottle) to all entrants to encourage them to enter and get the costs covered through sponsorship by local companies Hold a Raffle - Get local businesses to donate vouchers and combine them to make an awesome raffle prize – this is especially good in tourist areas where you can put together a weekend-away package including food, accommodation and entertainment vouchers for the winners. Sell something at local markets – for example get items from your local farmers at discounted rates, bundle them together and sell them for a profit. A bag of mixed vegetables for R100. Obviously, what you sell, depends on what your local area produces Garage Sale - Host a community-wide garage sale. Ask churches, students, parents, and service providers to donate their well-preserved, second-hand items for the sale. The key to any successful fundraising initiative is promotion! Give yourself enough time to plan and above all promote like there’s no tomorrow!

Rustics has been designing and building outdoor play systems since 2005. Naturally, over this time, we have built up an arsenal of standard designs that has been perfected and tested over the years. But that’s not all - we can also apply our expertise to design play systems to suit your specific requirements. Have a weird shaped space? Have a theme you want to create? Want to unleash the potential of previously unused spaces? If the answer is YES to any of these, we can help! Here are a few of our more interesting designs

The game has no rules, there is no starting point or end point and there’s a jungle gym in the middle of it all. This is an ideal environment for children to develop their social skills. Creating a game in this environment requires sharing ideas, expressing feelings while negotiating and reaching compromises, setting rules, managing conflicts, listening to others’ points of view and seeing things form another’s perspective. All of these develop assertiveness, communication skills, and a healthy leadership style. These social skills that will help children thrive in all aspects of their lives, can all be learnt with a Jungle Gym and a few friends To read more on the "Three Skills Children Learn when Exposed to Outdoor Play" see Mariana Plata’s article on the Psychcentral website. (Last updated: 24 Sep 2017) To access the social benefits of a Jungle Gym, please give us a call on 043 748 5880, send us an email

Play is not a luxury. Unstructured outdoor play presents children with risks and enables them to learn how to handle them appropriately. According to clinical psychologists Drs. Susan Davis and Nancy Eppler-Wolff (Children Who Soar: A Parent’s Guide to Helping Children Take Good Risks (2009)):“Risk is inevitable, and without learning the skills of good risk-taking, our children will be more apt to take impulsive and poor risks. Through the development of thoughtful risk-taking, children will be better equipped to leap at life’s opportunities, and to rebound from life’s disappointments. Learning to take smart risks early on prepares them to recognise and think through issues of safety and danger. They will have had experience identifying the challenge and the risk, and have worked with parents and teachers on how to proceed to the next step, using their intellect and emotional skills. They are also better able to struggle more tenaciously through failures because they have experienced small setbacks.” Unstructured outdoor play presents them with these learning opportunities – throw in a Jungle Gym with monkey bars, swings and slides, to hang off, climb up and swing from and the opportunities for developing risk assessment and management skills are immeasurable. To access the physical, creative, cognitive, social and emotional development benefits of a Jungle Gym, please give us a call on 043 748 5880, send us an email

When faced with the challenge of keeping their ‘fur kids’ entertained during the day while the humans were at work, they came up with quite a creative solution – a Doggy Jungle Gym. According to Louise, “One weekend, at our niece's birthday party, we saw all the kids playing and running around on the jungle gyms and thought our ‘kids’ would love this! We just hoped we could find a jungle gym designer and manufacturer who would not think we were crazy for wanting one for our dogs. “Rustics Jungle Gyms were amazing – they were very excited about the prospect of designing a new jungle gym for dogs. Toni threw herself into the research and sent us a design. We loved it and two weeks later it was built. "Our oldest child was the first one up there. The dogs love sitting at the top because they can see all around them. Our dogs are now the nosey neighbours!”

On his birthday, Rory came home from school to find the Rustics Jungle Gyms' team busy in his garden. They were building him a jungle Gym! You can just see the excitement on his face! He just couldn't wait to invite his brother and friends to join him when it was all finished later that afternoon.