Purposeful play

In my opinion when most people think of the word play they think about little children. When I hear the word play my mind also goes to thinking about little kids but not just them playing together. The one word that I had associated the word play with is imagination. But once I started thinking about Youth work and play I realized that it is not just play in themselves they are learning how to live in this world through play. Until Youth development I always thought of play to just be well play with children and young adolescents. But in reality we are probably teaching them more through play than with anything else. After reading the articles and watching the loom video I can show even more of an appreciation for play.  

    In the  reading by Jenkins as well as in the loom video they both talks about the 6 P's of Play; Permission, Process, Passion, Productivity, Participation, and Pleasure. I really enjoyed how Jenkins broke down each one.

  Permission: "The concept of permission is

closely linked to what game theorists call the "magic circle," that is a metal bracelet

which we put around our activities which changes their affect, their meaning, and most

of all, their consequences. Within that magic circle, we lower the consequences of

risks; we agree to engage with each other with good humor; we try hard but do not take

the outcome as seriously as we would if we performing the same activities outside of a

play context." 

Process: "Play values process as much or more than product."

Passion:" The Gates Foundation has found that an increasing number of young people are dropping out of school not because they are incapable of performing of what's expected of them but because they are bored."  -  In my opinion schools are still strict about staying on task and sticking to the curriculum and not really allowing children to show or share their creativity and this is why children are increasingly dropping out because they want to do what they love and unfortunately most if not all schools don't allow this because they are so dead set on the common core curriculum which doesn't really leave time for anything else 

Productivity: " Play is highly generative, despite or perhaps even because of its focus on process rather than product.  - Play is more important then we realize its not always about the final result but how we got to the final result 

Participation: "Play occurs in a social context which invites us to enter into the fun.

We do sometimes watch others play, to be sure, and this represents what educational

theorists call legitimate peripheral participation. We watch with the anticipation of

future participation. We watch to observe how others perform, to learn new skills, to

appraise our own performance, or simply because we do not yet feel in the right spirit to

play. But watching in this case is also a form of learning and is of a very different kind

than watching which occurs when we know we will never be able to participate, when

we feel that our participation is not welcome, when we anticipate not being able to do

whats expected of us." - In participation kids/young adolescents seem to hesitate because they want to observe what is happening in the situation first they don't want to jump into a situation where they may result in getting in trouble but they also don't want to miss out on having fun with his or her peers

Pleasure: "Pleasure is the byproduct of play. The search for pleasure is often what

motivates play."