1,000 words on the difference between 'playspace' and 'playspaces' that raises the importance of 'walls and doors'.
"We tend not to sit down for a meal in the laundry room, or take a bath in the garage. Yet, have you ever really considered why we don’t do that? It’s a useful question to answer when it comes to designing a playspace but the answer might not be the obvious one."
A biographical short on the importance of silliness.
"We should probably gloss over the night we nearly set the boat on fire because we had gone to the pub forgetting that we had left the oven on, or the trouble we got into by accidentally entering the tidal waters of Great Yarmouth."
1,000 words about where loose parts should best be left to get the most from them. It's largely about the word serendipity and a dead German biologist. The second of a two-part blog.
a \‘shȯrt-rēd’\ piece
"Whether we acknowledge it or not, when we adults gather specific materials together and place them in a context that we have pre-decided, like the tabletop, then we have both reduced the variety and the possible combinations available."
900 words on what happens when a five year old spots an aging playworker while trying to balance along a low wall, with a bit of a more than 100-year-old theory thrown in to boot.
"It is at this point that she noticed me walking towards the pair with shopping bag in hand and we briefly made eye contact – and something happened. Question is, what?"
900 words about Simon Nicholson's 'Theory of Loose Parts' that asks if we are missing something in our interpretation of his ideas.
"Pretty collections of beads and shells, plastic shapes and buttons, stored neatly in nice wicker baskets or storage tubs, etc. do indeed constitute loose parts, there is a slight problem here. Becoming fixated with seeing ‘loose parts’ as just these small aesthetically pleasing things at the expense of others that might be less attractive to the adult eye really misses the major idea behind Nicholson’s original theory."
"We often throw around the term ‘risky play’ as though it was a category of play like social play or gross-motor play. But it is not. Taking risks is simply one of the things children do when they are playing and, because a significant amount of playing is about pushing boundaries and extending ourselves, it turns out that most play is risky in one way or another."
This is a longer than usual piece as it was originally something published in the Barnados Ireland journal. It questions our approach to guarding against the risks and hazards that children face in institutional settings and suggests four particularly risky experiences that all children should have access to.
"I realised how tempted I was to point out to these two adults why their boys could not contain themselves and note that they themselves were creating an impossible situation for themselves and their sons - but it would have been ugly. So I didn’t."
Parents and other adults can be oblivious to the effect their actions can have on the children around them and can sometimes sap the wonder from children's experiences. This story describes two such examples - one conscious the other not.
"Throughout most of the 1980s I lived in a house down a cul-de-sac. It was a quite short street with not too many parked cars on and, completely by chance, had three or four playworkers living down it – two of us in the same house."
Children clearly create their own special places for playing but sometimes they need help from local adults to make this work. It can be as simple as asking the right questions and knocking on the right doors and it need not cost the earth.
"He momentarily lost his balance but once he’d recovered he put the stick back on the fence and carried on plinking and plonking."
Adults can help and adults can hinder. It's as simply a matter of attitude.
