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!
As of August 2021, we are two thirds of the way into the data collection for the Play Observatory and we're delighted with the range and diversity of contributions we've been receiving about children's and young people's play experiences during lockdown times. John and Michelle reflect in this post on the story so far and invite people to keep contributing (or do so for the first time!)…
In this guest post Lucy Turner from the Whitworth gallery in Manchester shares ways they have supported play with babies and young children online throughout 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.
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’.
Yinka Olusoga explains some of the history of researching children’s own ideas about their everyday play.
