People should play. Children know this inherently. They enjoy playing, they learn best while playing, and they develop healthy relationships and leadership skills while playing. It is one of the best things a child can do.
It is also one of the best things adults can do. Hey grown ups, let's play!!!
1 comment:
Chris,
I enjoyed seeing the picture and reading your comments about Play. It prompted me to think about some things I tried to teach in some of my classes. There is a rich literature about story. (The Healing Power of Stories by Daniel Taylor and The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination by Robert Coles) Each one of us is writing our own story and my story interacts with your story and neither of us is the same afterward. We change our individual stories by the decisions we make daily as we live.
Play is a lot like story. Quite a few years ago, Peter Patton, in a session given at the Richfield Teachers’ Workshop described a story as a window through which we look from the “real” world into the “ideal” world created in the story. The story creates its own world with specific characters and rules by which they live. Many people when they read a good story identify with one or more of the characters in the story; the character’s life becomes their life. In the story they are able to think about alternative rules and outcomes without having to actually experience them in their “real” life. Play is a similar window.
In play the same thing happens to a large degree. When a child becomes completely absorbed in play they are transported into another frame of reference, another world, the world of the play. In that play they are governed be the rules of the play, they, in the most creative aspect of play, make up their own rules, or they modify the rules to fit their needs and those who share their play. In play the rules of the real world and the time frame of the temporal realm in which we live are suspended. The play may be with trucks in the sand box; dolls in a playhouse; a game of tetherball, softball, or hockey; a game of cards or dominos; or a drama with lines to remember and perform. In play one learns from the rules and consequences of the play without having to be bound by the rules and consequences imposed by the “real” world. In any case, play or story, the imagination creates another world of ideas, values, rules, and possibilities that enrich our lives. Al Ogren
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