Parks of the Space Coast: Rotary Park


Today we visited the playground at Rotary Park! This park is located in Merritt Island, Florida.

This is a very large community park. It has soccer fields, gazebos, public restrooms, water fountains, a nature center, a boardwalk nature trail, and a playground. 
Today's review is primarily focused on the playground.

Playground
The substrate of this playground is loose wooden mulch. We found it difficult to play when wearing sandals, and prefer to wear closed athletic shoes and socks when visiting this park. 

Our favorite piece of equipment at this park was the merry-go-round. While they rode, we spoke about the forces they felt while spinning. We explored centrifugal and centripetal force in another blog entry with a more detailed lesson. Here's that link. http://steamma.blogspot.com/2022/02/circles-and-force.html

Here's a brief "Moment of Science" lesson about forces on a merry-go-round.

 Here is a photo of our daughters spinning together in different ways on this merry-go-round.
Swings! This park also had swings! You may be able to see them behind the merry-go-round in the image above. Belt swings and baby swings were both present here. There was also an empty bracket for what our children thought might have been a tire swing at one point.

Ladders and Monkey Bars made up another stand alone play structure. It was really fun for our 10 year old to swing around on.
There are two large play structures with slides, ladders, and more. One was lower to the ground while another was quite high! Here are photos of both.
Something that I appreciated was that there were benches throughout the park, including several in the shaded areas around the playground. There was always someplace for me to sit comfortably and watch the children play.

We loved the block staircase on the smaller children's playground. Here is a photo of it.
Rules 🚭
Something worth noting about this park is that the playground has a lot of rules posted. We have included a picture of the sign, I do not expect you to read it, and I won't list them all here. There are a lot of rules written in small text. Some of these rules were very welcome, like do not smoke near the playground. Most of these rules seemed reasonable, but a few of them were difficult for our family to follow. They don't let you climb up the slides here! 
When we arrived at the park, we found this sign and read through the rules together. We spoke about what it would take to follow these rules. Then we decided that it was going to be worth it. So we stuck around. We were happy that we did!

Lots of Children
This park is popular. If you arrive at a time without hoards of children present, expect them to arrive at any minute. The ample parking makes room for vans and busses. During our time there we saw 3 different large groups of children and many families enjoying the park.

Airplane Sightings
Look up- you might see a few fun airplanes! The entrance to this park is very close to COI, the little airport in Merritt Island. If you are a private pilot and happen to be flying into town on your own plane, here's information about the airport: https://flyspacecoast.org/merritt-island-airport-coi/

♿ Accessibility ♿
This park is more accessible than most! Here is a link to a video we made of the boardwalk nature path and visitors center.

Are you planning for a trip to the Rotary Park of Merritt Island, Florida? Learn more about this park on the county's website:

Other Parks
Are you interested in other local park reviews? Here's a link to a blog post where we keep track of all of the parks we visit on Florida's Space Coast!

Let's Play!

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