The Adventure Begins

"Hide-and-Seek!" "Heads-Up, 7-Up!" "Dodgeball!" "Four Square!" "Hopscotch!"
"Jumprope!" "Jacks!" "Chutes and Ladders!" "Freeze Tag!" "Ghosts in the Graveyard!"
"Ring-Around-the-Rosey!" "Tetherball!" "Uno!" "Red Light, Green Light!" "Monopoly!"

These are just a few of the "favorite childhood games" my students shared during role call on Tuesday afternoon when we met as a class for the first time. There are 33 of us, counting me (and I said "Kick the Can!"), and my guess is that everyone would agree that answering that simple role call question stirred a lot of childhood memories. There was a lot of smiling and laughing, accompanied by exclamations like, "Oh, yeah! I loved that!"

I'm so glad my students have these memories.

I worry that a lot of children growing up now might answer this question a lot differently when they're college-aged. I fear that they might instead provide a list that includes mostly video games and organized sports. Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with playing some video games (I'm old enough to have had "Pong," for goodness sake, and am dying to try "Rock Band"!) and I played organized sports from fifth grade on...

But children also need time for play and games that are not fed to them by a computer-of-some-sort, and are not organized and directed by adults.

And I fear many of our children are growing up with very little that fits those categories.

And that's just one of the reasons that my students and I are reading David Elkind's "The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon" this semester in our Advanced Child Development Theories course.



Elkind is a recently retired Tufts University professor who has written numerous books on child development, and "The Hurried Child," in my humble opinion, is a classic. Now in its third edition, the book's message has only become increasingly relevant in the 29 years since it was first published.

There are 10 chapters in the book, and we'll read roughly one chapter per week; there will be some lulls during the weeks we take exams. Well, and there's Spring Break -- ideally, we'll be playing then instead of writing essays.

Each student will write one entry on one chapter. I'll comment on their entries, they will comment on each other's entries, and we hope to gain a bit of a "following" who will also take time to comment now and then.

And about that "Yet to Be Named" blog title...I've asked my students to contribute their ideas for the blog name. The writer of the name selected will earn extra credit. Woo-hoo!

Oh, and I've encouraged the students to share a childhood photo to go along with each entry. I've started us off here with mine. Ya gotta love those pants! (Told you I was around for Pong...)















So here we go.