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.
The videos of talks by the team, and our guest speakers, earlier this year at our symposium on pandemic play are now published online. Please read on to access them directly from the blog… You can also see them all in a Vimeo Showcase (a playlist, in other words!).
The Play Observatory Team has some exciting news!
In this guest blog post, Anne O'Connor considers how young children absorb adult routines and rituals into their play, and what this looks like during the pandemic.
In the fourth and final blog in her series, Yinka Olusoga looks back on the play of the winter months and beginning of spring in 2021, and how the return to home schooling, the weather and the eventual lifting of some restrictions offered opportunities for play and creativity.
In part 3 of her review of a year of play in the pandemic, Yinka Olusoga talks about autumn 2020, the return to school and the experience of celebrating calendar rituals during a pandemic.
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’.
