Luther Halsey Gulick gave significant leadership and promotion to the playground and recreation movements of the early 1900s. With most of his time involved in the fields of physical education and hygiene, he liked to take ideas and thoughts, develop them further, put an organization together to bring the ideas to fruition, and then turn the leadership over to others while he moved on to another set of ideas.
Gaga ball is a popular playground game similar to dodgeball, but it is considered to be a kinder, gentler form of the game. The game is played inside a hexagon or octagon pit.
Functional play has been described as the first play of children. Beginning in infancy, as a child learns to control his actions and make things happen, he finds enjoyment in shaking a rattle, splashing in the bath, and dropping objects repeatedly from his high chair.
Man, Play and Games is a classic study of play and games and how they affect society and become a part of daily life. The book was written by Roger Caillois and was originally published in 1958 as Les jeux et les hommes.
Played with elements similar to baseball and soccer, one of the most popular children's games on the playground is kickball. The game is played by two teams who try to score more runs than their opponents by rounding the bases and crossing home plate as many times as possible after successfully kicking the ball into play.
Aldo van Eyck was born in the Netherlands and educated in England. At that time, the only existing play spaces were private and only for the wealthy. Aldo began designing playgrounds at 28 and over the 30 years that he designed playgrounds, more than 700 of his playgrounds were established in Amsterdam and echoes of his designs were being used throughout the Netherlands.
The zone of proximal development is a concept developed by social cognitive theorist and psychologist Lev Vygotsky. The zone of proximal development is the area where the child cannot solve a problem alone, but can solve it successfully under the guidance or collaboration with an adult or more advanced peer.
The Waldorf early childhood movement stemmed from a group of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart wanting a better method of teaching for their children. They asked Rudolph Steiner, to design a teaching method where teachers would teach out of love and respect for their students.
Tetherball is a game that has been popular on playgrounds, schoolyards, and summer camps for years. The game involves two players who attempt to hit a ball attached to a pole by a rope in opposite directions until one of them wraps the rope completely around the pole and the ball stops. The history of the game is uncertain with some suggesting that in the ninth century it started with the Tatars.
Body awareness is the knowledge of a person’s body parts along with the knowledge of what the parts can do and how to make the parts move. Body awareness helps people orient their bodies to their surrounding environment and helps them navigate through that space.
