Thursday, January 31, 2013

Our Latest News

Lots of exciting things are happening at Providence Children’s Museum lately!
  • Museum director Janice O'Donnell has been selected as a 2013 Rhode Island Foundation Fellow by The Foundation's Initiative for Nonprofit Excellence. Fellows are leaders who are committed to their continuous development and receive support and funds for an 18-month period of personal and professional growth. Janice plans to use this opportunity for in-depth study of "playwork," a model for supporting children's self-directed play as practiced in the United Kingdom. She will spend time in London learning from master playworkers and use this experience to train staff at the Museum and elsewhere in playwork practices – and we can’t wait to learn from her!
  • The National Science Foundation has granted Brown University's Causality and Mind Lab $713,000 to collaborate with the Museum on a three-year project investigating ways children develop scientific thinking skills and parents’ understanding of their children's learning processes. In addition to informing academic research, the funding will enable the Museum to develop communication tools to increase visitors' awareness of the learning that occurs through children's play.
  • Families Together, the Museum's therapeutic visitation program for children in foster care, was recently included in the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth’s Nationwide Listening Tour, examining innovative child welfare practices. Congress members Karen Bass (CA) and Jim Langevin (RI) visited Nina’s House, a homelike setting where Museum clinicians help families rebuild relationships. Click here for a summary of the listening tour.  

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

"Speaking of Play" Community Conversations

The Museum is delighted to be presenting Speaking of Play, a series of community conversations about the importance of children's play, in partnership with the Providence Athenaeum this spring.

These panel and audience discussions will raise awareness of the critical importance of self-directed play for children’s healthy growth and development. Conversations will be held at the Providence Athenaeum (251 Benefit Street in Providence) the first Tuesday of March, April and May from 7:00 - 8:30 PM:
  • March 5 – Leave No Child Inside 
  • April 2 – What Happened to Recess? 
  • May 7 – Play & Risk: How Safe is Too Safe?
Mark your calendars and stay tuned for additional details, including panelists and descriptions of each event!

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Talking Back: Playtime

Recently, on the Talk Back board in Play Power, we asked visitors "How do your kids play before or after school?"  Here are some of their responses, in words and pictures:

Monday, January 14, 2013

Play Watching

This article, by Museum Executive Director Janice O'Donnell, was also posted on Kidoinfo. 

If you’ve visited the Museum in the past couple of months, you may have noticed members of the staff with clipboards lurking in the Museum’s newest exhibit, ThinkSpace.  Doing some lurking of my own, I spent nearly 20 minutes watching a very small visitor push big wooden beads along the wire and bead maze, watch them slip down, push them up again.  Twenty minutes – amazing concentration for an 18-month-old.  I tracked a 7-year-old who solved one block-stacking challenge after another, translating abstract drawings into three-dimensional models, and a 9-year-old who was determined to map all of the mystery mazes.  I took notes, timed how long they spent at activities, and listened for spatial language: “Rotate it!”  “I need another parallelogram.”  A mom asked what I was doing.  “Observations,” I told her.


Careful observation is as important to the exhibit creation process as planning, designing, building and installing.  It’s how we know what’s working well, what activities engage kids of what ages, how adults respond, and what we should change.  We expect to be surprised.  No matter how carefully we test prototypes and how much experience we have, kids will do something we didn’t foresee.  And sometimes we know we don’t know, so we might put up a temporary label or try out a series of easily changed activities and see what happens.  We observe systematically for several weeks after opening an exhibit and make adjustments.


But our observation isn’t limited to new exhibits – it’s a constant.  We record and share stories of the power of children’s play in the Museum’s newsletter, on this blog, and on our documentation board in Discovery Studio.  Watching kids at play helps us understand and appreciate their capacity for and ways of learning, and we want our visiting adults to be as delighted by their children’s ingenuity as we are.  That toddler freely exploring cause and effect at the bead maze encountered a perfect learning opportunity, developmentally and physically within his reach.  One child, solving a mystery maze, said each of her steps aloud: “First it goes down, then when I do this it goes that way, and then it goes back and then down…”  Another silently drew his solution.  Different styles, same determination.


Children can navigate social situations as deftly as they solve a maze.  I watched two previously unacquainted kids, ages 6 and 7, working together to assemble seven large, unusually shaped blocks to build a cube.  A Museum play guide supplied well-timed hints, suggesting that they “try rotating it” and offering other clues.  The boys worked diligently, incorporating the hints: “One two three four – that side’s too high!”  “Start again!”  “Rotate!”

Five-year-old sisters of one of the boys joined them and even when the younger ones sat on the blocks and generally got in the way, the boys carried on.  “Give me the yellow,” one ordered his sister, who hopped off the yellow block and handed it to them. After at least four start-overs, they could see the solution.  Some silent understanding developed among them that the little girls would put in the last two pieces.  The last block.  The boys could see exactly how it fit in, but the 5-year-old couldn’t quite get it.  “Rotate,” her brother told her.  She turned it around and slid the final piece into place.  The boys climbed atop their completed cube, arms raised in victory, while everyone cheered.


In a recent blog post, museum planner Jeanne Vergeront suggests there ought to be an app for play spotting, which she describes as  “… pausing and observing children at play.  It is watching them and getting to know them and their thinking through their play.  It is noticing what fascinates them and glimpsing the intensity they invest in play.”

Children take their play seriously.  We learn so much when we take their play seriously, too.