My Childhood Play Memories

What Childhood Play Memories Light Your Mind?

In week two of the course on play, we were asked to get 10 items from around the house and recreate a childhood play memory.

One of the most important takeaways of this session for me is the importance of hearing or reading others' experiences, as they triggered more and richer childhood play memories for me.

 

I grew up on a farm surrounded by woods. We would make imaginary forts from the long grass, pull out layers of shale rock from beneath the cedar trees and pretend they were plates. We dug ruts in the dirt and rolled our pretend "cars" from town to town, and of course, we made mud pies, painted with flowers, slid down the sandpit in our socks, chatted with the animals, and searched for gold and fossils in the rock piles.

 It is amazing how much more I remembered of my childhood play experiences by reading and hearing the experiences of others. 

Since I'm inside, my initial memory was of building blanket tunnels with my younger brother and imagining we were tunnelling through to another world. 

Reading other people's responses reminded me of playing with my older .sister. She would teach me pop-songs to sing to an imaginary audience through a toilet paper tube tied to a skipping rope, or we would cut out "paper dolls" from the Sears or Eaton's catalogues and plan our future weddings.