We’ve mentioned Lenore Skenazy more than once here on our blog; here’s a video of her positing the idea that parents don’t necessarily need to get involved and drive their kids’ play, suggesting that it may actually be detrimental. After Lenore, a bunch of mothers you’ve never heard of chime in, agreeing or disagreeing based on their own experiences.
It would have been preposterous, at least for me or anyone I ever knew as a child, for parents to hunker down with us as we played stickball, skully, or anything else outside. That time was referred to as “going out to play” by parents and kids alike. We figured things out on our own, learned basics of fair play, wrote our own script for the day. And had fun.
I did play board games like Scrabble enough with my parents, but that’s not what I remember as “play.” What do you all think?
Careful readers of this blog may remember our last post about Baron Ambrosia, the host of Bronxnet’s show Bronx Flavor, and a YouTube clip showing him playing handball against someone dressed like Divine’s character in Pink Flamingos. The Baron has explained it all in his recently released episode: he’s playing for the Bronx against the evil “Queen of Westchester” to determine the ownership of City Island:
Baron Ambrosia plays handball-click to watch the episode on BronxFlavor.com
The Baron doesn’t provide an embed code for us to plant the show in our blog–and it’s not on YouTube–so click through Web 1.0 style and enjoy the contest! By the way: I’ve seen The Queen of Westchester many a time lurking through the Galleria in White Plains.
You know those four short videos we had of the Double Dutch Divas, with the bad aspect ratios and the Batman angles? We tried to fix them up a bit. Enjoy!
So as we’re putting together our Streetplay YouTube channel, we stumbled across this video of people playing a “Traditional Malaysian game” with bottlecaps on a round tabletop. Looks like fun!
If anyone has more information on what the heck this game is called or how it’s played, let us know in the comments section of this post! Until we find out, we’re going to call it “Malaysian skully“–kind of like “Chinese handball” but hopefully without the racist overtones.
We had videos on Streetplay way before there was a YouTube, but we have to admit, those guys have done it a little better than us. So, in the “if you can’t beat ’em, use ’em” kind of way, we’ve added our own channel on YouTube:
Perhaps better known as the impresario of the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren had a hit with “Double Dutch” in 1983 (a follow-up on “Buffalo Gals,” his take on what we called rap back then).
He definitely helped shape a lot of the music scene back then, mixing and matching genres. Sadly, he died today at the age of 64.
The latest thing in children’s play? The recess coach! This is a great listen from NPR’s Tell Me More program, featuring Jill Vialet (president and founder of Playworks), and NYC’s own Free Range Kids evangelist, Lenore Skenazy. Even Lenore, who scoffed at the idea at first (we’re guilty on that one too), sees some benefit beyond the knee-jerk “harumpfing.” This is mainly because no one is teaching kids any “actual reality” games to play anymore; the traditional way that kids learn games–from older kids–is going away because the older kids don’t know the games nowadays either!
Listen and decide for yourself… and remember that Streetplay’s Rulesheets are always there if you want: print them out and give them to your kids.
