Take Time

“The work will wait while you show the child the rainbow, but the rainbow won't wait while you do the work.”

Sometimes it takes a little more to get us to stop and slow down.  Thank goodness for rainbows.

Just Play Monday:: Photos and Quotes

In an effort to support the importance/necessity of play for young children, I've decided to use some of my favorite quotes on play and some of our playful moments in a post each Monday. Please feel free to list a link to your blog in the comments if you have some Just Play photos or a favorite quote of your own.

"Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning."

Fred Rogers from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood

"Play is a major avenue for learning to manage anxiety. It gives the child a safe space where she can experiment at will, suspending the rules and constraints of physical and social reality. In play, the child becomes master rather than subject. Play allows the child to transcend passivity and to become the active doer of what happens around her."

Alicia F Lieberman The Emotional Life of the Toddler

"In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior. In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself."

Lev Vygotsky
Russian psychologist

Just Play Monday:: Photos and Quotes

In an effort to support the importance/necessity of play for young children, I've decided to use some of my favorite quotes on play and some of our playful moments in a post each Monday. Please feel free to list a link to your blog in the comments if you have some Just Play photos or a favorite quote of your own.

“A child loves his play, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.”

Benjamin Spock (pediatrician, author)

"It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.”

~ Leo Buscaglia (author, educator)

“Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning…They have to play with what they know to be true in order to find out more, and then they can use what they learn in new forms of play.”

~ Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood)

Just Play Monday

In the past year I've done a lot of reading and thinking about young children and play. I think now days it takes a strong parent to feel secure in the fact that play is the most important thing their young child can do. In an effort to support the importance/necessity of play for young children, I've decided to use some of my favorite quotes on play and some of our playful moments in a post each Monday. Please feel free to list a link to your blog in the comments if you have some Just Play photos or a favorite quote of your own.

"It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” ~ D.W. Winnicott (British pediatrician)