New York City Opts for Playful Playgrounds

03/05/2007

New York City Opts for Playful Playgrounds

Children are the best audience: they are curious, enthusiastic, impulsive, generous, and pleased by simple joys. They laugh easily at the ridiculous and are willing to believe the absurd. Children are not ironic, disillusioned, or indifferent, but hopeful, open-minded, and open-hearted, with a voracious hunger for pictures and stories.
Eric Rohmann

In the Big Apple, City officials have unveiled plans for a new kind of playground, outfitted with ponds, pulleys, and bulky foam blocks intended to engage the imagination. To help guide children in their fantasy play, "play workers," dressed in matching bright yellow shirts and baseball caps, will oversee the action. According to the New York Times (January 14, 2007), this experiment marks the first significant change in playground design in decades, when "municipalities began replacing steel monkey bars and slides with the boxy, plastic equipment common in so many urban areas today."

The Times article continues, "Pschologists who spend time with children...say that it is important for youngsters to navigate kids-only play situations to develop their social instincts, such as how to join a game that has already started. Designers of the proposed playground were aiming for a space that, in a sense, recaptures the imaginative, collaborative games children used to organize routinely in their neighborhoods, before play dates and the American Youth Soccer Organization."

New Exchange Resource on PLAY

Play is the focus of the latest Beginnings Workshop Book published by Exchange. This practical curriculum resource contains articles by Elizabeth Jones, Jim Greenman, Margie Carter, Edgar Klugman, Stuart Reifel, Karen Stephens, and many other play experts. Sections of the book address: The Spirit of Play, The Value of Play, Block Play, Make Believe Play, and Play and Culture. View the Table of Contents

For more information about Exchange's magazine, books, and other products pertaining to ECE, go to www.ccie.com.