For Your Binder

Play and exploration requires enormous amounts of unscheduled time - time to do whatever one wants to do, without pressure, judgment, or intrusion from authority figures.  #play #teaching #learning #mixedages

Loose parts were provided on playgrounds located in two housing structures in Paris. The researchers had questions:  How will children play with objects that are not toys? How do the objects affect children's play? #play #toys #playwork #adventureplaygrounds #recess #outside

This was one of the articles that emerged after the 2015 release of the preliminary results of the (now) oft quoted Vanderbilt Study. #teaching #learning #play #DAP #Tennessee #Vanderbilt

There is no evidence that teaching children to read in PreK will help them be better readers in the long-run.  So how and when did we start thinking that it would? #play #pushdown #DAP #teaching #learning #reading

Play is a state of mind, but it is also a state of body, emotion, and spirit.  #play #teaching #learning #creativity

FUN FACT! Mother Nature installed the “play drive” for the same reason she installed that other drive – the drive to reproduce: BOTH are critical for the species to continue. (In fact, play makes you into the kind of person someone would want to reproduce WITH.)  #play #teaching #learning

You don't solve oil spills with multiple choice answers! The future favors the flexible! #play #resilience #teaching #learning #creativity

Disclosure: Depending on how often you find yourself on The Atlantic you might (or might not) need to start a free subscription to access this one. 

At the heart of this zero-sum game are assumptions that rigorous content requires work, while play is frivolous. #teaching #learning #DAP #play

Here is a link from the Play Scotland website to a graphic of all of the play types as identified by Bob Hughes! #play #playwork 

Awhile back I participated in an online seminar about Shindana Toys sponsored by the Strong National Museum of Play. I took a few notes but recently I happened upon this online slideshow that pretty much highlights all the points made in the session and includes some good photographs; so I am including it here for you.  #toys #equity #play 

A Q/A session with Gever Tulley, co-author of Fifty Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do  #risk #play #DAP #outside #parenting #teaching

Might some of the chaos found in the study of play theory be due to the lack of clarity about the popular cultural rhetorics that underlie the various play theories and play terms?    This link will take you to a stand alone chapter (written by Sutton-Smith) of The Game Design Reader:  A Rules of Play Anthology by Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman, 2006.  If Sutton-Smith is new to you, this will be a good warm-up before you dive into his 1997 classic, The Ambiguity of Play.   #play #theorists