Subject: Traditional Games Posted by Picasa

There is so much to say about traditional games. Of course there are games that you play in the street, and games that you play indoors. I was fortunate enough to experience street games in the 1970s in Ireland and Quebec, and learned many indoor board and action games. As a Montessori educator, I have collected resources and photography books about traditional street games. I have also been fortunate enough to travel and collect simple games, and viewed exhibitions about traditional childhood games in Barbados and Japan.

The Streetplay.com website is a wonderful resource for information about this topic. I was also pleased to see that a Canadian sportswoman has been supporting the Right to Play initiative, along with many of her Canadian colleagues, and has recently launched a book about child’s play.

I’m not completely negative about contemporary toys such as video games. For girls in particular, they are a useful tool to develop certain neurological-muscular functions. However, I wasn’t interested in the idea of looking at a TV screen and playing a game when younger, and still find it unappealing. In my classroom, while teaching overseas, I placed traditional games in the window sill that could be used after lunch. The children loved them and would often say that their parents hadn’t told them about these games.

Olympian Silken Laumann says the solution to childhood obesity is simple: play. (Bringing back fun , April, 2006, National Post)

“The schoolyard games have been lost. Kids don’t know how to play four-square, a lot of people don’t know how to play hopscotch,” says Silken Laumann, who over the next couple of weeks will be conducting sessions across the country instructing parents on the rules of the games most of them played as children.”