My Connections to Play

My Three year old granddaughter doing what all kids love to do , ride their tricycle 

My granddaughter riding her grandmas bike , the same type that I used to ride

Me doing what I always and still do love to do best, playing in the water 

My brother and me playing with our homemade boats at our  cottage, the most magical place on earth to me

How fun riding the tire swing just like in our day, but my granddaughters is pink

Playing at the beach s a favorite of every generation, here is my grandson to prove it

 

My beautiful mother and fabulous brother and me enjoying our little beach  together at the cottage

Our family enjoying the beach together at the cottage

               Some Valuable Quotes Supporting Play Seen        Through My Playful Eyes 

“Play keeps us vital and alive. It gives us an enthusiasm for life that is irreplaceable. Without it, life just doesn’t taste good” Lucia Capocchione

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”George Bernard Shaw

“Play has been man’s most useful preoccupation.” Frank Caplan

Children learn as they play. Most importantly, in play children learn how to learn.

O. Fred Donaldson

Creative play is like a spring that bubbles up from deep within a child.

Joan Almon

     As a child the games I remember playing the most were skipping, roller skating with the old fashion kind that clamped on your shoes with a key to tighten and loosen them,cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers when we played with the boys. The places we frequented were the fields at the end of our street that went on for miles and miles with the big pond, where we would loook for frogs and snakes, or the woods behind our house where we let our imaginations run wild and our bodies with it.
     But if I was to pick one spot with one special friend it would be the little beach at our cottage. My best friend Valerie and I would spend hours playing at the beach creating our own little world. We would use pine needles, pine cones from the tress, clam shells from the water and best of all acorns  and their caps to create our villages in the sand.The other major ingredient we needed was water which we would collect in our pails from the lake. We would dig holes in the sand  and pour the water into our holes in which we would create our witches brew. Yes, we were witches and quite evil at that. We would pretend to capture little children, poison them with our witches brew and bury them in our sandy graveyard. Yikes, I am scaring myself.Why we did this only a psychiatrist knows, or do they. Fantasy, imagination and team work, e merest  in this magical place, where we were powerful , and in control. Mixing our witches brew was the most phenomenal fun thing to do along with making spells. Little did our parents know that evil witches were lurking right under their nose, but they brought us picnic lunches all the same, and tucked us in at night.
     Play was what we did while growing up. We spent long hours every day playing. Our parents would encourage us to go outside and play with our friends, or  have our friends over.That was our life, or our work as some say.
     Now it is different. There is more fear around our children going out to play. Nature has been paved into concrete, and has become something we have to go  to to visit. Children now a days still play because that is instinctual, but technology is strongly influencing the modes of play that our children engage in. Board games and cards are becoming a thing of the past and I feel saddened by this.
     I really do agree with the  previous quotes that play is the magic ingredient in keeping us young mentally and physically and it fills our spirits with joy. Once play is eliminated from our lives the child in us is imprisoned , we must each free the child within us and let play led us through our days.