By Sarah Hall

Editor

Thanks to a Central New York Library Resources Council New Initiatives grant, the Northern Onondaga Public Library (NOPL) system will launch a first-of-its-kind program in Clay Central Park this summer.

From 4:30 to 7 p.m. every Thursday from June 28 to Aug. 16, NOPL will present “Community Playdate: An Anji Play Experience.” Families with young children are invited to come to the park to play with the materials provided. Each evening once the kids are done playing, they will create a Play Story, drawing or writing about what they’ve done. The program is free.

Anji Play is coming to CNY thanks to the efforts of NOPL Children’s Librarian Nicole Hershberger, who learned about it while examining the importance of the role of play in early childhood learning.

“I have been looking, for a long time, into doing more programs that involve playing and doing research on the importance of playing,” Hershberger said. “As I was doing that, I ran across this amazing program that the public library in Madison, Wisconsin, was doing that’s very similar to this. I listened to an hour and a half webinar, and at the end, I was like, ‘We have to do this.’”

Anji Play was developed by Cheng Xuegin, director of preprimary education for Anji, China, in response to what she saw as a deficit in early childhood education.

“She wasn’t super pleased with how early childhood education was going in China, because it was very similar to how things have gone here,” Hershberger said. “Younger and younger kids end up having more and more pressure to do more and more things.”

Often those expectations aren’t developmentally appropriate.

“You’re ending up with kids that are really young that are just not enjoying school because it’s not really centered around them,” she said.

So Cheng began observing her students, ultimately developing the concept of “True Play.” In True Play, kids follow their own interests and play with what they want how they want to, without guidance from adults. The adult’s role is to keep his or her “mouth shut; hands down; ears, eyes and heart open.”

“Kids get at least two hours of uninterrupted play every day, where they really get the chance to just decide what they’re going to do, what they’re going to play with, who they’re going to play with, for how long, et cetera,” Hershberger said. “The teachers are there and observing closely, but they’re really not stepping in unless it’s absolutely necessary for safety’s sake.”

At the end of the day, the teachers and kids come back together and talk about what they did — how they played, what they enjoyed, what they learned. The program is now in use throughout Anji, China, as well as in schools and libraries in California and Wisconsin. Undirected play, the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a 2007 journal article, “allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts, and to learn self-advocacy skills. When play is allowed to be child driven, children practice decision-making skills, move at their own pace, discover their own areas of interest, and ultimately engage fully in the passions they wish to pursue.” 

Hershberger said she is looking to recreate that experience this summer in Clay Central Park. She created a program with the help of the Madison library and applied for the CNYLRC grant, then reached out to Town of Clay Recreation Supervisor Scott Paulding to ask for a space.

“Scott… immediately got back to me,” Hershberger said. “I think I sent him an exploratory email, and he got back to me 15 minutes later and said, ‘Yes, we would love to do this. Tell me more about it.’”

The town is providing not only the space for the activity, but an employee to staff it and storage space for the play materials. Kids can use anything from regular toys to non-traditional materials — Hershberger is particularly excited about 24 giant carpet tubes she’s obtained — for unrestricted play.

“For the kids, it’s really about providing that space to play and to decide what they’re going to do. There’s going to be very few restrictions,” Hershberger said. “Obviously, we’re not going to let the kids run around with sharp sticks and rusty nails, but you want to provide that amount of risk that’s developmentally appropriate that really allows kids to stretch their abilities a bit in a safe way.”

The event is set at a time when working parents can bring their kids and, hopefully, temperatures won’t keep people away—“sort of in between blazing hot and mosquito time is what we’re trying to shoot for,” Hershberger said.

The librarian said she was looking forward to seeing what kids would do with the materials, but also what parents could learn from their kids in such a setting.

“There’s a lot of factors here that are very different from anything that we’ve tried before,” she said. “But we’re really excited about the chance to get out of the library and do something in a non-library space.”