We are very happy to announce that we have been invited to run our POP UP Adventure Playground at the Native Child and Family Services POW WOW in Dufferin Grove Park on Saturday September 27th. The Grand Entry will be at noon and POP UP play will begin at 1 p.m.
Did you notice? All dancers welcome!
What a wonderful day we had at Fairmount Park on August 20th!
The cardboard city really had space to spread out. Two groups of children built their own swing sets using the soccer goal posts for structure! Sandy soil, shovels, kitchen tools + buckets of water made for some gorgeous mud play!
For the time being, tools have been reduced to serrated knives and duct tape. Wood and sticks are available for strapping and supporting cardboard structures. The kids are finding that duct-tape and rope can do everything! They even built themselves a go-cart using cardboard tubing, tires and cardboard.
Check out last Sunday’s Cross Country Check UP and then, bring your children to our POP UP on August 20th at Fairmount Park, where knives will be used responsibly by the children.
So far – not one cut or scrape. Tears only once – about having to leave.
A little thought piece about play in the garden, published in Today’s Parent.
Let us know if you want help building one.
Ever since I started PLAYbynature, this website, this blog, I have been singing the praises of the U.K. model, the work of the last 25+ years of organizations such as PLAY England, PLAY Wales and PLAYLINK, to name a few, that have developed play provision into a reflective profession that protects children’s freedom and right to play.
PLAY Wales has been a leader in this movement from the very beginning, in the U.K. and globally. Their executive director, Mike Greenaway sits on the Board of the International Play Association, IPA World, and was a key influencer of the U.N. comment on the right to play that came out in 2013. This official Comment from a global agency re-iterates that play is a human right for children, a natural right and that our policies and plans for bigger and better subway systems, world class conference centres and intensified neighbourhoods need to include consideration of children at play.
We had another great day at our June 14 POP UP! The weather was fine and the local soccer league brought lots of drop-ins.
Our tinkering program proved to be very popular yet again. We simplified our offerings – with only soft wood like cedar and pine, hand drills and Japanese saws, that are easier for children to handle.
Almost every child, including toddlers, wanted to try out the saws!
GreenHere’s PLAYbynature Project wishes to thank Councillor Ana Bailão for her generous support to this event and to the PLAYbynature project as a whole.
GreenHere’s PLAYbynature Project embodies the idea that children and trees (and other forms of plant life) belong together and both of them grow best outdoors!
However, the nature in PLAYbynature is not only the outdoors. It is the children themselves as they unfold naturally through play. Play is the deepest form of learning for the developing child – unlocking their interests and abilities through intrinsically motivated explorations, pleasure, surprise, self-‐calibrated risk and self-‐directed socializing.
A recent article in the New York Times 
describes the latest brain research into the value of cursive handwriting. It`s about time!
The quote in my title is from Walt Whitman, an iconic poet of the environmental movement and he could serve in the same role for PLAYbynature. He loved nature and he loved the nature that he was. He loved his (flawed, inept, corpulent, insistent, probably quite hairy, over-sensitive) body. This may not seem related to play but it is!