Blog
Welcome to the Play Observatory! We’re making a collection featuring all kinds of children’s play during the pandemic and beyond - indoors or outdoors, onscreen or offscreen, playing, saying, doing, making. We are really interested in young people’s own views on their play during this unique time in history. Children and adults can send us pictures, videos, sound recordings, drawings or writing. Please play your part in the Play Observatory!
Kate Cowan explains the background to the Play Observatory and our aims for the project.
Picking up in May 2020, Yinka Olusoga continues her review of a year of play during the pandemic with part 2, looking at the summer months.
As we experience our second spring in the Covid-19 pandemic, over the course of the next four blog posts, Yinka Olusoga reflects on a year of her children’s play and leisure, in and out of lockdown.
Kate Cowan discusses some of the ways children have been playing with digital technologies throughout the pandemic and the debate surrounding young people’s ‘screen time’.
In the first of our guest blogs, Dr Ceri Houlbrook takes an imaginative journey into the future, asking how children's play during the pandemic could be interpreted through the physical, material objects they've created at this unusual time.
Cath Bannister finds past examples of play informed by illness in the archived papers of folklorists Iona and Peter Opie.
The Play Observatory survey is now live! Cath Bannister discusses what we mean by ‘play’ and what we are collecting.
