School Description
Ellis is a neighborhood school-serving students in Early Childhood Education through 5th grade, students from east and southeast Denver. Our focus continues to be literacy with students demonstrating their ability to apply reading and writing skills in all curricular areas. The diversity of our school community provides a richness that we feel is unique. We see this diversity as one of our biggest assets while also creating exciting instructional challenges for our staff. Within our school population are students representing over 30 countries and nearly as many different languages also represented.
Learning Landscapes Description
A large and expansive site, the plan embraces the school’s focus on a multicultural community and translates their ideas into outdoor learning and fun places.
Ellis Elementary School
Construction Date
April 2005
Landscape Architect
Design Concepts
Play Equipment Vendor
Play World Systems
School Garden Sponsor
Denver Urban Gardens
Slow Food Denver
Community Garden
Master Plan
Vision
Imagine Ellis Elementary a few years from now… Ellis’s landscape will be a unifying place that fosters learning and celebrates its community’s diversity. A place where diversity, exploration, and imagination are encouraged. It is a place where the community gathers for recreation, discussion, and education. Ellis provides opportunities for exploration and learning inside and outside its classrooms, acknowledging that each of us learns in our own way. Ellis is a safe, colorful gathering place “owned” by the community that accommodates the needs of a single child and a community at large.
Goals
- To create a multi-cultural setting that celebrates the diverse international population of the Ellis community.
- To create a safe, inviting place in which the Virginia Village and Goldsmith communities can take pride.
- To enhance the children’s outside learning experience through exploratory and imaginative play. Engaging activities, Age appropriate, Physically challenging, Mentally challenging
- To create a sustainable, low-maintenance landscape.
Design Development
Description
A large and expansive site, the plan embraces the school’s focus on a multicultural community and translates their ideas into outdoor learning and fun places.
Illustrative Drawing
Design Development Drawings
Presentation Boards
Construction Documentation
Description from Architect
The Learning Landscape playground at Ellis Elementary celebrates the school’s diverse community by creating an international playground setting. The site theme focuses on discovery and geography for educational learning. In collaboration with local artist Chevo Studios and based on the UCD master plan, Design Concepts developed the concept for the site as a large globe laid across the playground. Two curving “geography bands” cut through the asphalt play pad and represent the east-west latitude and northsouth longitude of Denver. Ellis Elementary is at the intersection of the bands with a bronze marker that includes an image of the school and its location on the globe. Two boulder “globes” a re also located at this center. One boulder is cut in half along the latitude of Denver and the other along the longitude. Major points of geographic interest are sandblasted on the cut halfs to illustrate the wonderful and amazing sites that share the same latitude and longitude with Ellis Elementary. These points are also found as bronze markers along the geography band. The markers highlight such locations as the famous painting “Las Meninsas” in Madrid, Spain, the Great Wall of China, and a giant crab that lives in the Sea of Japan. The markers are laid out to scale so, for example, students can walk from the center Ellis marker south 46’ to the Easter Island marker and discover that this cultural historic site is located 4,627’ from Denver (site scale is 12” = 100 miles).
Other site features include a geography garden, a globe climbing boulder, and a colorful custom shade shelter that has maps from around the world as ornamentation on the roof. Tables under the shade shelter, seat boulders in the garden and seat walls at the play areas offer many opportunities for school and community gatherings.
Illustrative Plan
Construction Drawings
Play Equipment
Shade Structure Plan
Shade Structure Photo