Archive | Parks, Playing and Playgrounds

Turns out this is not a lethal weapon. It's a swing.

A School Decides to Keep its “Dangerous” Swing

Teacher tszeyyrbih Tom — “Teaching and learning from preschoolers” — is a joy to read, especially in this case, where we find him bravely confronting that modern day terror: A swing. You may recall that Richland and Spokane Washington school districts both phased out their swingsets. As a spokesman for the Richland district explained at […]

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Getting dark! Time to run home!

Peter Gray: We Have Almost Destroyed Childhood

In this sweeping article about tsafrdnbne the importance of free, non-adult-lead play — the kind of playing most of us remember doing, like, all the time as kids — psychologist Peter Gray does not mince words. The Boston College psychology professor and author of Free to Learn (as well as the author of one of the most […]

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Slow! Kids playing (and parents nearby, of course).

More About Playborhood and Risk, From Tim Gill

. The New anrhtzzene York Times article on Playborhood, the open-to-all playground that Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike Lanza organized on his front and back lawns, continues to elicit a ton of comments and commentary. Here’s what Lanza wrote on his own Facebook page. And here’s a post by Tim Gill, the British visionary who blogs […]

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Is there a way to get kids back outside, making their own fun, unsupervised, unstructured, untrophied?

That Gigantic New York Times Piece about Free Play

In yhhhnsfhbi Silicon Valley, a dad named Mike Lanza wanted to create for his three sons the same kind of Free-Range childhood he’d enjoyed as a kid back in Pittsburgh in the ’70s: Time with buddies, having adventures, riding bikes and goofing around.  . Since this is the 21st century and childhood is so much […]

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Children being instructed in focus, balance, physics and joy.

Trying to Close the Achievement Gap, We Have Created a “Play Gap”

. File this under The Law of Unintended Consequences, or, more precisely, Force-feeding Young Children Academics Backfires. It comes from an article ershizdrie in the Washington Post by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, author of Taking Back Childhood: …The pressure to teach academic skills in pre-K and kindergarten has been increasing since the passage of the No Child […]

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St. Brelade's Bay, Jersey,  England, at low tide.

School Cancels Beach Trip for Fear of Sunshine

. File it under “Fear of frying.” A school in Jersey srrztineed (one of the Channel Islands between England and France) has cancelled its annual beach trip due to the possibility of sun. Students from St George’s Preparatory in St Peter normally enjoy an end-of-year beach day but the school decided to cancel the outing, […]

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