Click on the image below or this link for the article from the NY Times:
Friday, January 7, 2011
NY Times Article: Effort to Restore Children’s Play Gains Momentum
Good article. But, I can't help but feel something is tragically wrong if advice like "“Climb on the couch with your friends and pretend you are sailing on a ship to a distant land" actually needs to be said out loud. What has happened to culture if we need (re)training in order to (re)discover play? Or... maybe those kind of things are indeed going too far, and all we need is some space and time, and we'll all figure it our again on our own if we're not distracted by needing to try too hard. It's just that we need to provide the time and space in what is otherwise an (overly?) complicated world...
Click on the image below or this link for the article from the NY Times:
Click on the image below or this link for the article from the NY Times:
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I agree that a lot of restoring play is about setting the time and space to promote it and stepping back, but I also believe that today we can restore the culture of play easier/quicker through some encouragement. For example, it is much less common to find neighborhood children gathering for hours of play after school. It is also less common for children in low-income communities to come to school with social skills to deal with conflict on a recess yard in a productive manner. Providing the time and space is definitely necessary steps, but I believe there is a lot more we can do to restore this culture children's play in our communities.
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