My Connections to Play

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” -Plato.

Growing up, I was an Air Force brat.  With this came many different moves and many different times when I had to make new friends.  I remember when I was younger, I would go door to door when we moved somewhere new, ringing doorbells looking for someone my age to play with.  As I remember back to the places I lived, I remember a lot of outdoor play, and each place I lived seemed to have a theme.  Here are a few of the places I lived and the types of things I did when I lived there for play:

Summer of 1995
I was 9 years old and was in my bathing suit most of the summer
(I'm in the middle)

Fairfax, VA (2^nd-4^th grade) – When it was warm outside, the neighborhood game was kickball!  There were many kids my age and I remember gathering on hot summer days to play kickball.  One winter, there was a snowstorm that blew through and canceled school for a week.  I remember the pile of snow at the end of the cul-de-sac from the plows…it was probably 8-10 feet high and we had a lot of fun climbing it and sliding down.  I also remember sledding down a hill that year.  At the bottom of the hill was a chain link fence, so we padded the fence with lots of blankets and drove our sleds right into it, going as fast as we could. 


Winter of 1996
Sitting on top of the hill with my friends getting ready to slid down for the 53rd time
(I'm in blue with the red ski mask)

Montgomery, AL (5^th grade) – I only lived here a short time, but riding bikes was the neighborhood activity.  Our street was a big hill (the cul-de-sac was at the bottom of the hill) and I remember building ramps out of plywood and cinder blocks and flying down the hill to see how far we could jump on the ramps. 

Charleston SC (6^th-8^th grade) – I was getting a little older at this point, but still loved playing outside.  We used to swim at the neighbor’s house and go look for shark teeth at the end of the neighborhood that hadn’t been built yet.  There was a lot of undeveloped land near the Ashley River and for some reason, there was an abundance of shark teeth in the dirt there.  I stored mine in a blue M&Ms Minis tube. 

Halloween 1994
Halloween was one of my favorite holidays because I got to dress up - one of my favorite passtimes
(I'm in the middle, on the left, in an angel costume)
Sidenote - my brother is the tall one in the back...don't know what he was dressed as...

Some of my favorite indoor activities when I was younger (no matter where I lived) were playing Barbies and dress-up.  I loved my pretend world where I could make up situations and pretend to be someone else. 

I had lots of "modern" barbies, but I also had this one.  My mother passed many of her barbies on to me.  This was one of my favorites because of her sparkley dress

“In our play we reveal what kind of people we are.” –Ovid

I think play has changed a lot since I was a kid.  There is so much more technology now than there was when I was younger, and I feel that so much of play today is based around that.  There seems to be less creative play in pretending and more video games and television.  When I was a child, we only had one TV in the house and we watched it together.  If you didn’t like what the family was watching, you could go play with something else. 

To me, play is essential.  Through play we learn to create, to take turns, and to problem solve.  Play is more than just fun, it is necessary. 

“Play is our brain's favorite way of learning.” -Diane Ackerman