Never Gets Old

In July 2019 I was proud to be on the team that organized a loose parts event on the Halifax Common that attracted 200+ kids on a perfect summer’s day.

Dr. Michelle Stone of Dalhousie University, with support from The Lawson Foundation, led the Summer of PLEY project including this loose parts pop-up. She invited a cross-section of researchers, students and practitioners to help her pump up the play. With the largest variety and greatest number of loose parts seen in Nova Scotia, the more, the merrier theme characterized the day.

Here’s the video shot by A for Adventure which has just been released. So many moments of discovery, joyful abandon and freedom. Enjoy….

It is really a privilege to see how children play with loose parts, how they work together to build, create, explore and have fun. Wonder, inspiration and energy are always in great abundance.

After leading, or helping to organize about a dozen public loose parts play events in Halifax, my experience is that it never gets old, never does. The smaller scale loose parts play taking place regularly in our backyard over the past five years continues to be enthusiastically embraced by kids throughout the neighbourhood, another indication of its everfresh qualities.

Long live loose parts and may their use become more widespread.

Happy birthday to our daughter Nellie who turns 13 today.

 

For Each Kid a Story

The Halifax South Common is popping, erupting in play. A ‘loose parts’ emporium is scattered in pods across a grassy canvas on what has been public land since at least the 18th century.  On this July day, kids arrive in family groups, with day camps and in gaggles of child care centre pre-schoolers. Before it’s over, 200 kids are dispersed throughout the pop-up zone intent on touching, testing, trying, telling – infusing this public play extravaganza with their joy, energy, words, motion and ideas.

Touching, testing, trying telling…

There is an abandon, some wildness if you wish. Standard conventions are no longer applicable. The assortment of recycled and donated items are the versatile props in an ever-changing drama featuring kids in starring roles as they reveal ingenuity, imagination and inventiveness. It’s play-a-palooza where deep curiosity extends time’s elastic stretch.

 Waiting for the Wildness

Kids and loose parts together are like bits and pieces of exponential merriment. A charged expectancy permeates these encounters and, perhaps counter intuitively, a steady hum of lightness ensues. The air is electric with possibility yet there is no pressure to perform. As the kids play out, rich thematic patterns emerge.

• Wonder and discovery, play’s elemental touchstones, are rampant, discernible in facial expressions, in the inflection of voices, in smiles and laughter.
• Cooperative play is an unspoken default cutting across gender and age as kids build up, tear down, design, transport and otherwise demonstrate that when fun is paramount no crowd is too diverse, or too large.
• Movement and exploration, balancing, climbing, running, rolling – getting from ‘a’ to ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’ and so on with an accent on fun. With each step, skip, jump an incredible journey – fall here, hide there, disappear, dare.
• Creativity, design and build, a smorgasbord of DIY forts, towers, cubby holes, dens, catapults, swings, teepees cobbled together with only the materials on hand and each one displaying distinctive character.

The unbridled joy, the immediacy of creation and the early stirrings of kids exercising agency are such a privilege to experience. They keep me coming back for more of this hopeful simplicity. Now I have heard some people characterizing loose parts as a nostalgia trip, a reach back to a romanticized golden age of play in some idyllic, kidtopian past. This doesn’t reflect my experience.

For Each Kid a Story

In the here and now, loose parts are becoming increasingly popular as a comparatively low-cost means of engaging kids in creative, physically active play. They are being integrated with positive results in child care settings, schools and municipal recreation spaces. As for nostalgia, there were no large scale, open ended, public play events back in the 60s when I was a kid. They just didn’t exist. It wasn’t until the 70s that the first wave of academic interest in loose parts came on the scene.  We had plenty of fun just the same and benefited from significantly more independence and greater mobility than today’s kids experience.

This particular July loose parts iteration is thanks to Dalhousie University’s Summer of PLEY, a giving back to the community following the Physical Literacy in the Early Years research study in child care centres. Event volunteers gathered recently on the Dal campus to share their reflections on the experience. It was affirming to hear how others had processed that day of play. There was much commonality. Listening to the project leads and other volunteers is what led to these musings.

And now for something completely different…

Each of the 200 or more kids who dropped in at the Halifax South Common that fine summer day lived their own story. The narratives varied giving more or less weight to different elements touching on creation, cooperation, adventure, fun, friendship and discovery. The kids were fully engaged, éveillés – awake.

With a growing body of literature that points to the efficacy and benefits of loose parts play, it’s time to press for it to become a more widespread part of the play canon in both institutional (municipal, school, etc.) and community settings.

Hard at Play

Bravo to the Dalhousie University team led by Michelle Stone. They brought together the largest selection and volume of loose parts ever collected in Nova Scotia, enabled a huge group of volunteers to participate in the planning and roll out of the event and exposed young graduate students to hands-on magic. Thanks for inviting me along.

All hail loose parts! Last word to the kids….

 

On the Road

It’s an on the road again kind of summer for our family. In Baie Comeau, Quebec near the beginning of our camping safari, this sign makes me think about that late, great 1940s American road odyssey immortalized in print by Jack Keraouc and celebrated in song by the 10,000 Maniacs.

 

In contrast to that rowdy, beat defining Americana, our 2,000 kilometer camping tour across three provinces in nineteen days is a distillation of simple pleasures. Roads and ferries connect us from one pocket of green to another. As we cozy in to explore, we soak up sounds, sights and smells that have no parallel in urban landscapes.

The kids are steeped in play and adventure in equal measures. At Parc du Bic, Parcs du Fjord-du-Saguenay, Lac Témiscouata and Cap Jaseux we climb, hike swim and revel in the natural surroundings. From Tadoussac’s coastal boulders we see whales blow then roll gracefully beneath the surface. In the parks there are deer, eagles, herons, hawks, groundhogs, chipmunks, squirrels and each morning darting songbirds nudging us into wakefulness.

Back at the campsites, there are endless rounds of grounders, tag, capture the flag, 50 – 50 and other games with a varying cast of kids from Québec, Europe and other parts of Canada. The Parks system provides free bikes for children. There’s a lot of active transportation along the dusty serpentine roads…

 

All the while, a slate of Summer of PLEY activities and events led by Dr. Michelle Stone’s Dalhousie University crew continues in Halifax. Just prior to our departure on the camping trail, an outdoors loose parts extravaganza with 200+ playful kids creates a new wave of ambassadors for unbridled fun and demonstrates alternatives for outdoor play that are not playground dependent.

The Summer of PLEY moves from the spontaneity of kids with loose parts to the more studied style of public presentations. Dr. Mariana Brussoni from the University of British Columbia and a frequent media commentator on risk and outdoor play comes to town for a couple of public engagements including a keynote – Risk, Resilience and and the Renaissance of Play  (click through for video). Additional videos from the Summer of PLEY series available here.

Dr. Brussoni is in Halifax on National Play Day, August 7.  The day is being revived by the Canadian chapter of the International Play Association (IPA) to encourage public play events across the country – disclosure, I’m a board member. Dr. Brussoni, Halifax Mayor Mike Savage and the Chief Medical Officer for Nova Scotia, Dr. Robert Strang are game to get their play on for the cameras in support of kids and play. This is one of my favourite pics from their photo session.

Dr. Strang, Mayor Savage and Dr. Brussoni getting their play on at Fort Needham Memorial Park on IPA Canada’s National Play Day.

Maybe we’ll be able to use these pics for promotional purposes next year….

Our meander through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Québec finally comes to an end as we pull into our Eastern Passage home for a couple of days. Before we know it, the girls and I are off to Prince Edward Island where I make a short presentation on the value of outdoors nature play at the Atlantic Summer Institute Forum – Supportive Environments for Youth Mental Health.

It’s an honour to be there to listen to stellar presenters with deep experience supporting mental health. The keynote speaker – Dr. Gaynor Watson-Creed, Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health for Nova Scotia helps to set the tone with a meditation on welcoming and attachment.

The conference inspires me to launch a new project, Atlantic Canada Adventures, still very much in the early days – more on welcoming and attachment coming soon. The adventures relate to identifying activities, places and strategies to help kids develop a deeper connection with nature and with Atlantic Canada’s rich natural ecosystems.

Not long until school starts back now. We’re off on our last summer camping trip today. Back in September….