Get Out and Play!

My mom's garden in Dorset, my playground for the summer :)

In the past two weeks I have been in Hawaii, Seattle, Boston, Connecticut, and Vermont. My baby sister graduated high school (making me feel quite old), my hang-gliding instructor brother whom I hadn't seen in two and a half years (insanely too long) visited from Santa Barbara, CA with his girlfriend, and my fiance Dylan went out of town to visit family and friends without me for the first time in years. It has been a crazy fourteen days and I've been a bit overwhelmed, which is why I've been so absent lately. I am still settling in here in Vermont, a place I haven't called home in years, so my brain is a bit jumbled, making it hard to come up with anything new. So instead, I've decided to share a gem of a video that has been on my mind lately. I can't believe I haven't shared Stuart Brown anywhere on the Sparks site yet, but now is as good a time as any right?

Sad to leave the many playgrounds of Hawaii

Dr. Stuart Brown is the founder of the National Institute for Play, a non-profit dedicated to "bringing the unrealized knowledge, practices and benefits of play into public life." His research is astounding and inspiring, putting scientific data and articulate explanations behind all my thoughts and feelings about the importance of play, not only in early childhood education, but in life as a whole for human beings of all ages. When I stumbled upon the Dr. Brown's TedTalk titled "Serious Play" (shown below) which he presented at the 2008 Art Center Design Conference, I was absolutely ecstatic. I've always know that play was important, I've heard Teacher Tom talk about it on his blog time and again, Lauren and I discussed it time and again at Bella Mente, and I've felt it in my own experience as a teacher, student, and human being, but I've never been able to back up how I felt with much more than my own opinion and anecdotal evidence.

This is fine for some people, but many are skeptical of the role of play in education, thanks to rote learning and an over emphasis of standardization and testing being the norm in traditional schooling. And before I am a teacher, I am a researcher at heart, it's where I got my start in education as a serious career and it is an important part of who I am, how I learn, and how I share my information. So needless to say, discovering Dr. Brown's work and the Institute for Play was like striking gold for me. Enough of me ranting, I'll let you check it out for yourself. Here's the talk, and definitely check out the website for the Institute linked above and learn more about the importance of play for your children, the children you work with, and everyone else in the world. Dr. Brown says, "the opposite of play is not work, it's depression," so for your own mental health, get outside and play around for a while, whatever you love doing, take some time today and go do it! I'm going to head out to work in the garden with my sister, and then maybe dance around shamelessly to some guilty pleasure music while I design and organize my new living space. It feels good to be home.