I’ve been feeling a little downhearted this year about education and the way things are going for children in some schools, about their learning and play. So it was uplifting to come across this little film showing something different. And as it’s the shortest day, with the most dark and least light, I thought I’d share it with you.
The film was made during one normal lunch time in a Bristol school that is lucky enough to Continue reading
I’ve just been filled with inspiration for parks again after reading the Welsh poet and wordsmith Dylan Thomas. I’ll share his wonderful words and childhood memories in a minute.
First, what’s the difference between playing inside or outside the fenced-off play area? Twelve years ago when my children were really little, I spent hours at a time in local parks big and small. Sometimes, by 9am, I’d be down there Continue reading
It’s the summer holidays and I’m tired, and that reminds me of The Museum of Tiny Things – a game born of guilt, resourcefulness and pure laziness; the kind where you just can’t move…
It was back in May, and we were on a short holiday in Port Isaac, Cornwall. Continue reading
“Presenter Helen Mark heads to the edge of Bristol where a council-managed forest at Ashton Court provides an escape for city-dwellers. She joins a group of friends to see how the wild space inspires them and if it can rival their computers and meets author Ingrid Skeels whose own alternative education led her to create her children’s book, St Cuthbert’s Wild School for Boys.”
Every year for the past 10 years we have gone on holiday to a little kingdom in Somerset: a long row of beach huts with grass on one side and the great expanse of the beach and sea on the other. Continue reading
In a good way.
Alice and I were presenting Playing Out to hundreds of attendees at the April 2013 Flourish Conference. It was organised by The Save Childhood Movement, set up following UNICEF research findings that children in the UK are among the unhappiest, most pressurised and commercially vulnerable in the developed world. In itself, enough to make you want to cry…
“We may not have the answers,” the Movement’s founder Wendy Ellyatt said in 2012, “but what we can no longer say is that we don’t have a problem.” Flourish brought together Continue reading
“Shut up!” “No, you shut up!”
Last June, my sister and I travelled by ship up the coast of Norway, across the Arctic Circle, to the far northern border with Russia and – inadvertently – back to childhood. We were taking my Dad, who had long wanted to do this trip, and we two sisters were squished in a tiny cabin. It was the time of the Midnight Sun when