Nicole Land thinking with Andrea Thomas, Selena Ha, Maria Wysocki and Alicja Frankowski

The sand area in the playground is studded with cut stumps from trees that were uprooted along the other side of the building. These stumps stand as tiny adult thigh-height towers. Climbing on to and jumping off of these stumps is a very interesting way of moving with the playground, and for a few weeks the children often climb and jump barefoot off the stumps. As we moved within the sand with the children, paying careful attention to how we all move with the tree stumps, we began to notice there’s many questions and ways of noticing unfolding: there’s ideas of rules and unfamiliarity (“was this really okay to go barefoot and to jump off the log?”), relations with sand and skin and tree stumps and towels, questions of why and how jumping happens, and curiosities about how we can understand barefoot-sand movements as a collective, situated, unique event.