Summer Blog Series 2023:
Summer, the Libraries & PLAY #5

The last installment of our 2023 Summer Blog Series is from returning guest blogger Elizabeth McChesney.

Playing for Higher Stakes: The Human Rights Game

Learning through board game play dates back thousands of years and has many strategies and outcomes. In Victoria, Australia, Hugh Kingsley, Educationalist and Founder of The Brainery®, believes gameplay is an excellent educational tool. “I see it this way,” says Hugh with a twinkle in their eye, “If students are having fun, they are engaged, they are learning-that simple.” But what about a game that can help build empathy in youth, promote pro-social behaviors, and encourage freedom, equity, and dignity?

Building on his expertise as an educator and creator of learning tools, Hugh and his co-collaborator turned to co-creator, Andrea Chorney created a game that could address issues related to the record level of child and teen anxiety and where “mores, ethics, and values are learned from non-traditional sources often with materialistic and prejudice underpinnings.” Hugh continues, The Human Rights Game came from a shared place of desiring to help children learn right from wrong in a rapidly changing world. I put this argument into a letter addressed to the Director General of the United Nations, and about a week later, I received a reply. Now I’m thrilled the Human Rights Game is an approved resource available on loan from the resource library at the UN Geneva.”

The Human Rights Game is also available to educators, youth groups, schools, camps, and libraries. Although it can be played in a home setting, the best outcomes develop when played in a learning environment with a facilitator. It is a highly engaging, fun game that addresses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 30 Articles and its three underlying pillars: Freedom, Equality, and Dignity.

Players ages 10+ engage with four decks of cards to discuss how they would handle potential ethical scenarios based on the 30 Articles. Bounce Back Cards add certain chutes and ladders elements related to environmental issues. “I hope the game will empower kids, teens, and adults and vest them to live within the UN’s healthy framework that recognizes freedoms and rights come with a responsibility to each other and the wider world.”

The game makers highly recommend a post-game discussion where facilitators ask questions and help clarify misunderstandings. This is followed by players’ extension activities that will help keep the learning about human rights alive and ongoing.

Hugh’s enormous heart and intellect are matched by his huge vision for the game:

“I believe that following a healthy behavior framework such as the UDHR 30 articles will lead to less racism, antisemitism, hate, bullying, and anxiety.”

About the Author: Liz McChesney served as the Chicago Public Library Director of Children’s Services and Family Engagement, where she earned numerous national awards, including the American Library Service to Children Distinguished Services Recipient. She now serves as the Community Partnerships Consultant to the Laundry Cares Foundation, where she helps build early learning in everyday spaces such as laundromats, WIC Centers, and family courts. She additionally serves as a Senior Advisor to the Urban Libraries Council and is a Senior Fellow at the National Summer Learning Association. In all these roles, play is at the center of her work. She has two books with the American Library Association, Summer Matters: Making All Learning Count (2017) and Pairing STEAM with Stories (2019). Her first picture book, Keke’s Super Strong Double Hugs, was published in 2020 and her forthcoming book, The Path Forward: Serving Children Equitably is forthcoming.

About the Summer PLAY Blog Series: This summer we are featuring some great PLAY resources with our 2023 Summer PLAY Blog Series, starring invited play partners as our content experts.  PLAY is important no matter what season it is…so NO SUMMER LEARNING LOSS here!  For 2023, we are reprising the Libraries & PLAY blog series.

Summer Blog Series 2023:
Summer, the Libraries & PLAY #3

By returning guest blogger Elizabeth McChesney (bio below), along with Bryan Wunar,  President and CEO of Discovery World (Milwaukee).

Playing Around with STEM and Literacy: Libraries Bring Together Learning through Play

Play as a public service is a global concept explored by public libraries. Library leaders worldwide convened in May 2023 in Aarhus, Denmark, for the NEXT Library Conference. The Aarhus Public Libraries, who created this conference, is a mecca for play and learning for people of all ages.  The role of play as a democratizing and essential public library service was one of the core pillars of the conference.

We were honored to present a session called Playing Around with STEM and Literacy  at the conference. In this session, we explored how playing, linked to scientific concepts and children’s books, can help build the flexible and agile thinking scientists and science-literate citizens need. Play can promote critical 21st-century skills: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity, and it can also help children to spark curiosity and informal learning and be successful working in diverse teams. It can also develop key cross-cutting science concepts laid out in the Next Generation Science Standards.

Playing with science or science play marries together some of the characteristics of play (active, risky, communicative, enjoyable, involved, meaningful, sociable, therapeutic, and voluntary) to  to best practices of scientific thinking (including persistence, curiosity, and perseverance). Open play allows children to explore concepts related to a scientific idea or principle. Examples include filling plastic cups with water in the bathtub or playing with how sound reverberates when a young child hits a kitchen pot with a wooden spoon. Directly connecting play to a scientific principle allows youth to make sense of the world around them. These examples show how a child utilizes both inquiry and observation in their play. Good science learning depends on taking chances, exploring the unknown, and being curious about how things work, fit together, or act upon one another. Science play promotes the habits of mind of effective 21st Century learners: those who can practice communication, collaboration, creativity, and problem-solving.

Our session at NEXT Library focused on two types of science play. First, we explored the engineering design process and how play can help us help a character in a book. Participants played with a way to use index cards to build a stable structure for the three little pigs to take cover from the blustering, big, bad wolf. In teams, we played with shapes in structures, what makes a stable foundation, and how to build a tower. This is an example of how libraries combine a children’s book with play and scientific concepts. Said Lena Sjornsen, Sweden: “Playing with these concepts is the best of hands-on learning and play. It is fun, but it also helps build vocabulary, solidify science knowledge, and even helps us build empathy for those little, lazy pigs!” We believe this type of scientific play also builds the skills needed to promote the language comprehension strand of the Scarborough Reading Rope which comes from the research we refer to as the Science of Reading. When we engage children in playful reading, we are helping to build background knowledge, vocabulary, language structure, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge. Casper Gurrensen of Finland said, “This makes so much sense to play with stories and extend them in these fun and informal science investigations. It takes the risk out of doing science and makes the play the center while children are learning all around the play.”

For our second experience, we used scientific background knowledge and habits of mind to help land a payload- a raw egg-without it breaking. Teams used materials, bartered with others, and played with how to drop or land something successfully. Scientific skills, including testing, observing, predicting, problem-solving, utilizing resources efficiently, collaborating, and iteration, are all displayed when children or conference participants try this project.

Connecting play to scientific concepts is a fun and effective way to learn in the summertime or anytime. Play is an enormous vehicle for learning and libraries and museums are wonderful places for the discovery and exploration that bring together science, and literacy through play. Discovery World in Milwaukee, WI, offers this extensive list  of science activities that can easily be adapted for kids of all ages to use in playful learning.

Photo descriptions:
Photo1 – Bear Slide outside the Dokk 1, Aarhus Library
Photo2 – Participants at Playing with STEM and Literacy build a stable structure. But can it withstand the weight of the wolf? Or in this case: a book about a wolf?
Photo3 – Raw eggs are loaded into a landing contraption at NEXT Library Festival, Aarhus, Denmark.
Photo4 – A team of new friends collaborate on their ‘egg-stronaut’ lander, “NEXT Egg.”

About the Author: Liz McChesney served as the Chicago Public Library Director of Children’s Services and Family Engagement, where she earned numerous national awards, including the American Library Service to Children Distinguished Services Recipient. She now serves as the Community Partnerships Consultant to the Laundry Cares Foundation, where she helps build early learning in everyday spaces such as laundromats, WIC Centers, and family courts. She additionally serves as a Senior Advisor to the Urban Libraries Council and is a Senior Fellow at the National Summer Learning Association. In all these roles, play is at the center of her work. She has two books with the American Library Association, Summer Matters: Making All Learning Count (2017) and Pairing STEAM with Stories (2019). Her first picture book, Keke’s Super Strong Double Hugs, was published in 2020 and her forthcoming book, The Path Forward: Serving Children Equitably is forthcoming.

About the Summer PLAY Blog Series: This summer we are featuring some great PLAY resources with our 2023 Summer PLAY Blog Series, starring invited play partners as our content experts.  PLAY is important no matter what season it is…so NO SUMMER LEARNING LOSS here!  For 2023, we are reprising the Libraries & PLAY blog series.

Summer Blog Series
Libraries & PLAY #1

True Play and Literacy Connect at the Library

Public Libraries across the country are pursuing play as a critical pathway to learning. Connecting play to the mission of the public library is just one of the many ways public libraries are moving beyond the bricks and mortar repository of books and into an active laboratory of experiential learning. This approach emphasizes risk-taking, problem-solving, and the four critical 21st Century Skills: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. True Play is one of the most compelling forms of play in public libraries.

The idea of True Play—embracing the child’s deep and uninterrupted engagement in the activities of their choice— was developed by educator Ms. Chen Queqin in the public early childhood programs of Anji County, China. Anji Play, Ms. Cheng’s approach to early childhood education centers around five fundamental principles: love, risk, joy, engagement, and reflection. This philosophy asserts the right to True Play is essential to every child and profoundly respects the capacity of the individual child to play and work with others. Programs that embrace this approach provide children with large and open-ended materials like ladders, tires, and planks to play with as they wish. Educators, including librarians, follow this philosophy and seek to create “spaces of love” where materials, the environment, and adult decision-making all respond to children’s needs and abilities, particularly their need to play without adult guidance, direction, or interruption. For that reason, educators who put this philosophy into practice observe children playing with the adults “hands down, mouth shut, and ears, eyes and heart open to discover the true child.” This approach allows children to take authentic risks, including physical, emotional, social, and intellectual challenges, to experience joy and maintain meaningful and authentic engagement.

The Madison Public Library has pioneered this critical form of play in community-based settings at its “Wild Rumpus” events. True Play events come from years of research, visits to Anji County in China, and the creativity of librarian Carissa Christner and the Madison Public Library team who has worked to bring these events to life at her library.

Says Carissa, “learning happens when you can explore something interesting to you at your own pace and time. For us, this was a meaningful connection to the five practices of Early Literacy: Talk, Sing, Read, Write, and Play.” At Madison Public Library, finding meaningful intersections in how people learn while respecting individual diversity is critical. Carissa says: “Play is the most universal and accessible early literacy practice for a diverse community of learners. True Play is critical to our equity efforts.” Holly Storck-Post at Madison PL is thinking about how to develop elements of True Play inside the library that will be meaningful for babies and toddlers. She is helping to establish Play Labs which combine aspects of Anji Play into spaces for the youngest library users. “Creating open-ended experiences inside the library for our youngest children helps us make our spaces accessible to the entire community.”

True play is offered in libraries across the country, including Washington State where Kitsap Regional Library Director Jason Driver says, “approaching play from a place of true respect for the child and the child’s learning is at the heart of this approach and critical for its success.” In Kitsap, True Play Jamborees are planned to “develop early problem-solving, risk-assessment, and collaboration skills, all while having a blast.” Says “Emmon Rogers, Youth Services Librarian: “during COVID, kids have had limited social and learning connections. We wanted to tap into play to develop kids’ ability to form social bonds and take physical and social risks, all necessary for healthy human development and learning. Anji Play allows us to build all these skills and helps develop critical social networks that have gone missing these past two years.” Also critical to COVID recovery is helping parents and caregivers relearn how to stay flexible and allow children to learn alternate paths to problem-solving. “COVID meant that only one pathway or tap root to social stability and learning was formed for kids,” says Emmon. “That was the family. At the height of COVID, our library’s greatest response was meeting basic needs like food. Now our greatest mission is fostering basic human social needs like connection, autonomy, agency, and social bonds.” Another aspect critical to the process of Anji Play is reflection. Reflection allows a child to close the learning cycle through digesting and understanding the play and its effects. Play stories are integral to the play process and can include dictation, writing or drawing the child’s stories, and photography or videography. Key to literacy development, the Play Stories develop numeracy, sequencing, vocabulary, inventive spelling, and narrative description. Professor Rebekah Willett, University of Wisconsin-Madison iSchool, and an observer of Madison Public Library’s True Play “The reflective component of Anji Play helps solidify some of the cognitive work that happens during play – both for the children and the parents. By pausing to observe and record play, participants can make explicit some of the implicit learning that happens during Anji Play.”

Bryan Wunar, CEO of Discovery World Science Museum in Milwaukee, WI, and noted STEM educator agrees: “Reflection allows learners to make meaning, analyze their actions and codify their learning. The type of reflection in True Play is also the habit of good STEM learners.” Reflection closes the learning cycle, and this process of Anji Play mirrors the Habits of Mind of a successful 21st Century learner. While True Play has many benefits for a growing learner, it is also a source of joy. Joy comes from risk-taking, problem-solving, working together, and being “in the flow.” Joy is intrinsic to learning and growing up to be a happy and well-adjusted person. Greg Mickells, CEO of Madison Public Library, may say it best: “True Play contains many elements fundamental to learning, including critical thinking, risk, and curiosity; but what I have witnessed with Anji Play is how important joy is to literacy. Having an opportunity that brings joy to learning should be an experience for all children.”

About the Author: Liz McChesney served as the Chicago Public Library Director of Children’s Services and Family Engagement, where she earned numerous national awards, including the American Library Service to Children Distinguished Services Recipient. She now serves as the Community Partnerships Consultant to the Laundry Cares Foundation, where she helps build early learning in everyday spaces such as laundromats, WIC Centers, and family courts. She additionally serves as a Senior Advisor to the Urban Libraries Council and is a Senior Fellow at the National Summer Learning Association. In all these roles, play is at the center of her work. She has two books with the American Library Association, Summer Matters: Making All Learning Count (2017) and Pairing STEAM with Stories (2019). Her first picture book, Keke’s Super Strong Double Hugs, was published in 2020 and her forthcoming book, The Path Forward: Serving Children Equitably is forthcoming.

About the Summer PLAY Blog Series: This summer we are featuring some great PLAY resources with our 2022 Summer PLAY Blog Series, starring two invited play partners as our content experts; Liz McChesney and Meghan Talarowski. Our experts will be sharing blog posts with you throughout the months of July and August.

Summer Blog Series – Libraries & PLAY #2

“Wash, Spin, and Play at the Laundromat”

Wash, spin, and…play? You may not think it, but all types of meaningful play are ‘bubbling up’ in the everyday space of laundromats. All across the country, local laundromats are teaming up to offer early learning through play in their facilities. The Laundry Cares Foundation, in partnership with the Too Small To Fail Initiative of the Clinton Foundation, supports this initiative to bring play to everyday spaces. The goal of the Laundry Literacy project is to bring transformed spaces, high-quality play materials, and beautiful children’s books along with trusted messengers from the community. Offering this to children who have a long dwell time during laundromat visits, a mundane yet essential family chore, allows for playful learning opportunities. “A core strategy of Too Small to Fail has been to transform everyday places into playful, literacy-rich environments that would delight and captivate children and provide support for their parents as well,” said Jane Park. Families typically spend about two hours at their local laundromat each week and return on a weekly cycle. “We see that the laundromat provides a critical space for families to continue their learning,” says Brian Wallace, CEO of the Coin Laundry Association. “Through Laundry Cares Foundation, we are transforming our space and outcomes for community kids. Play is essential to that effort,” Wallace continues. Literacy experts agree: “We know that play is learning; bringing play together with other early literacy initiatives and into everyday spaces is an impactful way to meet the needs of our communities,” says Brian Bannon, The Merryl and James Tisch Director at the New York Public Library where he oversees educational initiatives. Partnerships with public libraries to provide story times, open play, and play-based learning opportunities is an essential element of this work. The New York Public Library
has been fundamental in bringing early literacy activities to area laundromats.

Over 200 laundromats across the country have transformed empty corners or unused areas of their stores by installing a highly curated ‘kit of parts’ called the Family Read, Play, and Learn spaces. These spaces contain a child’s table and chairs, a small couch for a parent and child to read or play together, and many fun ways to learn and play. “Providing high-quality materials that encourage open play and exploration in a transformed space is essential for a lasting impact,” says Marisa Conner, Early Childhood Consultant to Too Small To Fail. Blocks, puppets, building shapes, magnetic letters, and a play washing machine are all a part of these installations and serve to increase child engagement and instances of play in the space. In fact, pre-eminent early literacy researcher Dr. Susan Neuman of New York University has been researching this project for over five years and has found that transforming the space of the laundromat alone can change outcomes for kids: children were observed engaging in thirty times more literacy activities in laundromats that include the prototype kit compared to laundromats without the kits. “Children are eager and ready to learn,” states Dr. Neuman, “and the laundromat can be a place of immense learning through play, books, and language.”

Ongoing learning initiatives are also rolled out through the participating laundromats. This summer, in partnership with author Sandra Magsamen, the laundromats have been promoting play connected to Sandra’s new book, I Wish Wish Wish For You. This is a national summer learning initiative of Laundry Cares in partnership with Sandra Magsamen Studios and Source Books Publishing. “This book is about all the dreams we have for our children. This is a critical time for us all to wish for our children and to hear and understand our children’s wishes for the world,” said Sandra as she launched this book and the World of Wishes Campaign at the National Summer Learning Association last fall. Through bilingual posters placed in participating laundromats, children are guided to build a city using the Read, Play, and Learn Space building blocks. Other prompts encourage children to find a bubble in the washers and make up a story imagining it taking off into the world. Liz Terrell, Early Childhood Consultant for the Laundry Cares project who worked on this national summer initiative, says, “Guiding play around this beautiful book and the environment of the laundromat helps children draw meaning and make connections, which is how children learn and grow.” Additionally, child-directed play in the laundromat is encouraged year-round. This play allows the child to take control of their play, own the ideas, and have power in the process.

In July the Laundry Cares Foundation offered a five-site Free Laundry and Literacy Day throughout metropolitan Atlanta. Free laundry was provided to help families get ready for the start of school and ribbon cuttings occurred in these laundromats’ on five new early learning sites. The day was filled with playful learning as children created their wishes and played with bubbles. “I like to play,” said eight-year-old Tala-hisha, “but sometimes I don’t get to because I have to help my Mom.” The new laundromat space will allow her and her family and other kids just like her time and space to dedicate to play and reading while the wash is spinning.

Other play initiatives in the laundries have included a partnership with Sidewalk Math that allows children a contract-free way to learn mathematical patterns while hopping, skipping, and jumping on math-pattern games placed on the laundromat floor. This was accompanied by a deck of math concept cards which were created by Highlights Children’s Magazine. The cards promote games that draw on math concepts such as shapes, sorting, and counting. The Highlights math decks were distributed to over 5,000 families across the country at the height of COVID. “The laundromat is a great place to learn math,” said Dan Naumann, Executive Vice President of the Laundry Cares Foundation, “Sidewalk math and the early childhood math cards are great examples of how guided play can promote learning in our stores. Laundromat owners know that transformed space is not only good for business, but it’s also good for kids, and that matters to us.” Philadelphia laundromat owner of The Laundry Cafes, Brian Holland, echoes that sentiment by saying, “play is at the heart of equitable learning in our communities. Using our everyday spaces-Laundromats- to help our children and our communities flourish is what matters most.”

For more information on how to bring play to a laundromat near you, please reach out to Liz@Laundrycares.org.

About the Author: Liz McChesney served as the Chicago Public Library Director of Children’s Services and Family Engagement, where she earned numerous national awards, including the American Library Service to Children Distinguished Services Recipient. She now serves as the Community Partnerships Consultant to the Laundry Cares Foundation, where she helps build early learning in everyday spaces such as laundromats, WIC Centers, and family courts. She additionally serves as a Senior Advisor to the Urban Libraries Council and is a Senior Fellow at the National Summer Learning Association. In all these roles, play is at the center of her work. She has two books with the American Library Association, Summer Matters: Making All Learning Count (2017) and Pairing STEAM with Stories (2019). Her first picture book, Keke’s Super Strong Double Hugs, was published in 2020 and her forthcoming book, The Path Forward: Serving Children Equitably is forthcoming.

About the Summer PLAY Blog Series: This summer we are featuring some great PLAY resources with our 2022 Summer PLAY Blog Series, starring two invited play partners as our content experts; Liz McChesney and Meghan Talarowski. Our experts will be sharing blog posts with you throughout the months of July and August.