Digging in the clutter I came across a literary game I played in the back of a college notebook. (I should have been taking notes.) It’s simple. Write down a well-known line from a poem and provide an unsuitable second line. Another way to play: Make up a random and outrageous second line and have someone guess the first. Here…
A recent visit to Montreal found us at the MAC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal Fortified with coffee and breakfast treats at Olive et Gourmando on Rue St. Paul, we walked up Rue Saint-Pierre and onto Rue de Bleury to Rue Sainte-Catherine. We managed to miss the entrance – even though it was right in front of us – but nonetheless…
The good folks at 21 Toys are at it again. First it was TThe Empathy Toy and now The Failure Toy The Empathy Toy is beautifully constructed and a pleasure to hold. Not to mention fun to play with and helpful in provoking communication and thinking about oneself and others. I’m looking forward to playing to fail! So much healthier…
I love these quotations from the National Institute for Play home page. “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” Plato “The truly great advances of this generation will be made by those who can make outrageous connections, and only a mind which knows how to play can do that.” Nagle…
As a follow-up to my post The Perils of Education I was preparing a piece on play. My chief concern being that the word play – like the word progressive – is itself so plastic and open to so many interpretations that defining it is like holding water in your hand: However hard you try to hang on it dribbles…
Come play the way we learn – it’s an invitation and it’s on a billboard right there on Hooker Avenue*. The invitation is to the big event we have coming up on Saturday – Fall Festival Reimagined. I love that invitation because it strikes right at the heart of the negative stereotype that I heard so much about when I…
If you’ve been to the webpage, read your email, looked at Facebook or been on campus you will know that the FFR (Fall Festival Reimagined) wing of the PA is actively recruiting older students and parents to be Play Agents for the big event on Saturday, November 19th. Readers of this blog will know that I’m a card-carrying believer in…
A must read article from the Times of London. Playing Games Makes Your Child Clever
April 23rd 2010 – Shakespeare’s birthday and Poughkeepsie Day School begins live streaming Diary of a Scoundrel – Alexander Ostrovsky’s cynical play about hypocrisy and the trouble with literacy! You can see it here. Thank you David Held- for the live streaming and the videography. David assures me that it only takes half an hour or so to learn how…
Here’s an article to read by David Elkind in the NYTimes Playtime is Over It’s an important topic. It’s an interesting article. And it’s one well worth reading and talking about. There is one piece though, that I have to comment on right away: For children in past eras, participating in the culture of childhood was a socializing process. They…
So the debate on the purpose of play in early childhood simmers on. It popped up on my Facebook page yesterday with this from the ASCD: Play is problem solving That then led me to the The Playtime’s the Thing from the Washington Post. The pressure is on to raise achievement scores and this puts the squeeze on time for…
Midge Hazelbrow, the indomitable co-head of Wayward St. Etheldreda’s Academy, took herself for a brisk constitutional down Riverside Drive to the Eleanor Roosevelt statue. By the time she stepped back into the St. Etheldreda’s building that had been her professional home for almost thirty years, her mind was clear. Of course, she’d already apologized to Tim Endibel for her injudicious…
When I taught fourth and fifth grade at a school that didn’t assign grades, the topic occasionally came up among the students. On the bus, they’d hear their peers from other schools boasting about their As on tests for spelling or naming all the state capitals. Grades seemed like fun and useful bragging points. We always closed out the week…
It was the Gert Loveday review of Rancid Pansies (it’s an anagram) that set me off to read James Hamilton-Paterson’s trilogy of comic novels that chronicles the outlandish misadventures of Gerald Samper. Part Henry Wilt and part Bertie Wooster with a touch of the growing pains of Adrian Mole, Gerald Samper – of the Shropshire Sampers – is his own…
A post on LinkedIn caught my attention this week. It’s had over 11,000 views so I’m not alone. Tanya de Grunwald and Dr. Julie Scanlon had an announcement about the launch of a podcast here and here that you can also read below. The title caught my attention and then the topics, some of which have been rumbling about in…