GOOSEBERRY Hill Primary School students received a play equipment upgrade after Kalamunda resident Daryl Buckett built a mud kitchen using his own materials and those donated by Kalamunda Bunnings.

The primary school’s P&C recognised the children’s play area needed upgrading after discovering that the Year 1 students only had an old sink at the sand pit to play with.

Mr Buckett said he volunteered to craft a new mud kitchen for the school where his four children attended in the 90’s and now four of his grandchildren were in attendance as that was motivation enough.

“I just couldn’t wait to get something sensible there that you could actually play with and use,” he said.

“And kids of that age, they love playing with mud kitchens, and my daughter-in-law, she’s the president of the P&C (at Gooseberry Hill Primary School), thought it would be great to have a proper one instead of the grotty one that they had.

“Then they would have something that’s going to be appealing to them so that at playtimes they can go out there and play with it.”

Mr Buckett said Kalamunda Bunnings were quick to support the idea and though they didn’t have the timber he needed, he received a $100 voucher to get it from their Midland store.

“Communities work better if people do this because I’m retired now and when you do something like this, the time that you spend on it is far more rewarding than any job you go to and get paid for,” he said.

“I absolutely encourage it – there’s so many areas that we can volunteer for these days that it’s just a case of looking around to find someone that’s in need of what skills you have.

“Don’t waste them.”

Mr Buckett said he was hopeful of the benefits play-based learning could provide and hoped he was feeding into a positive cycle of bringing up good adults.

“Play-based learning, it teaches them so much,” he said.

“It’s good for their social contact, getting on with one another and it’s important that as they socialise together that’s how they hopefully grow up to be good adults together.

“You can get a child in a seat and teach them for three hours at a desk, but play-based learning teaches them the same thing but from a different perspective.

“I was always told that 80 per cent of everything you’ll ever learn, you do so by the time you’re aged four.

“Everything I learned back then – and as you get older, you might forget what you said two minutes ago, but you remember something back then.

“I’m just reaching 74 now and everything I needed to know was 70 years ago.

“You realise how much you took on board and how much you learned from family and friends and neighbours and so on, and how good it was for you – because you do, in fact, carry that learning through your life.”