This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 113 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode we're going to learn about the Global School Play Day.

A day we can all set aside to give our students and ourselves a full day of play.

What I first agreed to do a podcast on this topic, my enthusiasm was at about a six.

The idea of schools taking an entire day to do nothing but play sounded like a nice idea.

I was aware that time in school for things like recess, art, music, and physical education

was shrinking.

And I'd read the stories about how kids in other countries like Finland and Japan play

a lot more than kids in the US do.

So I knew it was a topic worth looking at, but I still wasn't too fired up about it.

I should have been because my own awareness of our problem with play has certainly increased.

I've watched my own three children grow from small kids who could spend hours tautling

around a play room, finding endless ways to entertain themselves into preteens who can

lose half a day staring at tiny screens.

And I've seen what happens when we take those screens away, when we tell them to take

a couple hours off and do something else, how they flounder around clueless, completely

incapable of coming up with their own fun.

All about a week ago, that was the extent of my thinking about the problem.

A prolonged shrug, as I told myself, that my husband and I really needed to do better

at getting our kids away from their screens so they could wake up those other areas of

their brains.

But then I watched this TED talk called The Decline of Play, given by a psychology professor

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