Playing It Up With Loose Parts, Playpods, and Adventure Playgrounds Joan Almon, Editor Playing It Up With Loose Parts, Playpods, and Adventure Playgrounds Joan Almon, Editor Playing It Up—With Loose Parts, Playpods, and Adventure Playgrounds Copyright 2017 by the Alliance for Childhood All rights reserved For permission to reprint or translate, contact: [email protected] Alliance for Childhood P.O. Box 5758 Annapolis, MD 21403 202.643.8242 allianceforchildhood.org Playing It Up can be ordered from amazon.com and is available online at allianceforchildhood.org Suggested citation for this book: Joan Almon, Editor, Playing It Up—With Loose Parts, Playpods, and Adventure Playgrounds, Annapolis, MD: Alliance for Childhood, 2017 Cover and graphic design: Sheila Harrington, Studio Five Text Editing: Carol Petrash Photo credits: Jill Wood (front cover) Liza Sullivan (back cover) Jeremiah Wood (title page) Play:groundNYC (table of contents) Table of Contents Preface—Stuart Brown .........................................................................................iii Chapter 1 The Back Story—Joan Almon ..................................................... 1 Chapter 2 Play: Rising Up!—Rusty Keeler ................................................ 9 Chapter 3 Getting Started Introduction ................................................................................................. 17 Pop-up Adventure Play—Morgan Leichter-Saxby with Suzanna Law ................ 23 Let’s Play Initiative (IL)—Liza Sullivan and Blakely Bundy ................................ 31 Santa Clarita Valley Adventure Play (CA)—Jeremiah Dockray and Erica Larsen-Dockray ........................................................................ 39 Rebuilding the American Dream Through Play (OH)—Tricia O’Connor ....... 45 Adventure Playgrounds and the Maker Movement (WA)—Kevin Mills .........54 Additional Play Projects .............................................................................. 60 Chapter 4 Adventure Playgrounds Introduction ................................................................................................. 65 Huntington Beach Adventure Playground (CA)—Mark Hoxie ...................... 69 The Hands-on-Nature Anarchy Zone (Ithaca, NY)—Erin Marteal ................... 74 Play:ground (New York, NY)—Reilly Wilson .................................................... 80 The Sallie Foster Adventure Playground (Omaha, NE)—Teal Gardner .......... 87 Chapter 5 Playpods in Parks and Schools Introduction ................................................................................................. 93 PlayCorps in the Parks (Providence, RI)—Janice O’Donnell ............................ 96 Playing in the After School Program (Houston, TX) Jill Wood .............................................................................................. 102 The Recess Playpod (San Carlos, CA) Allison Liner and Kerry Folan .............. 109 A PlayPod in Our Schoolyard (Durham, NC) MaryLu Flowers-Schoen and Kimbie Sprague ............................................114 Recess Revolution (CA)—Kristin Shepherd ................................................... 119 i Chapter 6 Playing in Nature Introduction ............................................................................................... 125 An Adventure in the Forest (Mercer Island, WA) Diane Mortenson and Paul West ............................................................. 128 Children at Play Initiative (near Louisville, KY)—Claude Stephens ................ 133 The Nature Play Zone (Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore) Kimberly Swift ....................................................................................... 139 Chapter 7 Advocating for Play—Linda Rhoads ................................... 145 Afterword: Sustaining the Adventure Play Movement ............ 155 Resources ....................................................................................................... 157 The Playwork Principles ..........................................................................161 ii Preface o become fully human, children need intrinsically driven engagement in play, alone and in groups. As Joan Almon and the Alliance for Childhood have Tfostered, and this book extends, the realization of this need has been credibly established. Now it needs to be broadly enacted. For children, play allows the inner world—as it biologically races toward maturity— to integrate with the outer world. When allowed to flourish, play provides motivation, resiliency, purpose, and meaning. But today this fact of nature is being disregarded by mainstream culture, and the consequences require remedial collective action and committed leadership. Yet such action requires a commonly held belief in the value of play. As historian William McNeil wisely penned in his “The Care and Repair of Public Myth,” (Foreign Affairs, Fall 1982 issue) despite the fall of the French, the British in WWII collectively believed they could defeat the Nazis, and with the Grand Alliance, they did. Public belief becomes a mythic truth that is both felt and cognitively understood. When a public myth takes hold, then collective action follows. We are desperately in need of a new consciousness or mythology about the true nature and importance of play. When this credible, scientifically backed truth becomes a collective belief, the disastrous consequences of contemporary play deprivation will be ameliorated. This book offers beacons that, when enacted, illuminate paths that bring the magic of play into parks and parishes, schools and neighborhoods with the joyous sparkle that play gives to our life force. Author Trained in general and internal medicine, psychiatry and clinical research, Dr. Stuart Brown first recognized the importance of play by discovering its absence in the life stories of murderers and felony drunken drivers. His years of clinical practice and review of over 6000 personal play histories affirmed the need for healthy play throughout the human life cycle. His exploration of human and animal play led to the establishment of the National Institute for Play. Stuart Brown was executive producer of the three-part PBS series, “The Promise of Play.” His book, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul has been translated into eight languages. Dr. Brown co-teaches “From Play to Innovation” at the School of Design at Stanford University, and enjoys international corporate and academic consulting on play and its many contributions to overall human well-being. iii Chapter One The Back Story In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior. In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. —Lev Vygotsky Joan Almon very book has a back story, and this one stretches back to the Alliance for Childhood’s founding in 1999 and its commitment to play as a healthy essential of childhood. The Alliance began out of a deep concern for the decline in children’s health and well- Ebeing. Medical professionals and educators banded together, hoping that their combined knowledge of children and their commitment to healthy child development, would stem the increase they were witnessing in children’s physical and mental illnesses. Part of the problem was that many children were under mounting pressure to perform to adult standards—often developmentally unrealistic ones—all day long. After school, many children were over-scheduled with adult-led activities and were also immersed in screen time. Between ages 8 and 18, surveys by the Kaiser Family Fund found that children spent over seven hours per day outside school in front of screens. What did children used to do instead of attaching themselves to screens? Initiate play alone or with friends. And a survey of children recently showed that when asked what they’d like to do if they could plan a day of play, most answered that they’d like to go outside and play with friends. Time with screens was rarely mentioned. Play is more than an entertaining activity for children. They have always used play to deal with stress and strain. It is not surprising, although deeply disturbing, that at the same time that play has disappeared, illnesses in children, Chapter 1 The Back Story 1 such as obesity, anxiety, depression, hyperactive disorders, and autism, have grown at alarming rates. Why is play so important to children’s development? Play supports children’s healthy physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development. Without it, serious gaps in development can occur. An extreme outcome was identified by Stuart Brown, a retired psychiatrist and founder of the National Institute for Play, who studied the lives of hundreds of Texas prisoners incarcerated for murder. He found that one of the common elements in their childhood was a lack of play. Since its beginning, the Alliance has been committed to doing everything it can to strengthen children’s health and well-being. This includes restoring play to children’s lives. We are especially interested in play that is initiated and led by children and that expresses their own concerns and interests. Such play is full of the stories children create to understand themselves and the world around them. It often begins with the magical words, “Let’s pretend.” Yet increasingly people have told us that children no longer know how to play. Experienced kindergarten teachers have said that if they give their children time to play, they do not know what to do. “They have no ideas of