by Kyle Nguyen, Staff Writer
Just yesterday, students from Sean Ziebarth and David Theriault’s AP Language and Composition classes brought in their favorite childhood games and toys and participated in Global School Play Day with their fellow peers.
Founded by Scott Bedley and Eric Saibel, Global School Play Day (GSPD) is a day solely dedicated to unstructured play in school and first launched on Feb. 4, 2015. The way GSPD works is that classes or schools register on globalschoolplayday.com and inform the organization that they will be participating and educating their students on how beneficial “play” really is.
“This is my third year of participating in GSPD. I actually came across this because I personally know and met the creators of GSPD through Twitter. They teach elementary school and middle school and after watching a TEDx video of Peter Gray, they kind of just got their heads together and decided to help encourage kids around the world to play,” said Ziebarth.
In Peter Gray’s TEDx Talk, Gray discusses that there’s been a decline in play in the current generations of children and it has had a negative impact on their behavior, mental well-being, etc. Ziebarth himself also observed that his students had a difficult time even interacting with one another and playing.
“From what I saw, I believe that it was very beneficial for our students to experience and go back to their roots of play. Since the semester just ended and we just finished finals, it was just a good, head-clearing experience, almost like a nice piece of ginger before having that next piece of sushi,” said Ziebarth.
All in all, both students and teachers found it very exciting to be able to be free and enjoy a whole hour of unorganized play with one another. Especially being in high school, students don’t necessarily have the same amount of free time as they once did in elementary or middle school. As a result, putting down your electronics and interacting with classmates during this liberating day has allowed Barons to fully reap the benefits of unadulterated play.
“I definitely think that it’s something we should implement at school, even once a week maybe. It was a day of being ‘unproductive’ in the best possibly way,” said Vivian Thong (’18).
