Adventure Play Days give Sudbury kids a chance to use their imaginations

While a lot of children in northern Ontario are enrolled in summer camps or organized sports for the summer, there's an effort in Sudbury to encourage more unstructured play.

Émilie Pinard, a professor at Laurentian University's McEwen School of Architecture, and Pierre Harrison, the founder of the organization PLAYLearnThink, have launched Adventure Play Days at two local playgrounds.

The play days happen throughout the summer, every Tuesday evening at the Riverdale Playground and Wednesdays at the Antwerp Playground.

The idea is for children to play with loose materials like cardboard boxes, art supplies and even some tools like hammers and handsaws. 

"The key component of a play day is giving control to the children," said Harrison.

"When children are controlling their play, they're developing things like problem solving, resilience. It's absolutely wonderful."

Harrison said if a child plays with a telephone, for example, but pretends it's a car, that's fine.

"That's the beauty of loose parts," he said.

"It can be anything as long as the children are free to do whatever they want with it."

Harrison said children don't have as many opportunities today to participate in unstructured play.

"There are psychologists that have been studying that and they've also noticed that, you know, anxiety, depression and suicide amongst children has been increasing as the abilities or the opportunities for play have been decreasing," he said.

Pinard's own children have participated in the play days.

"They really enjoy it. They asked to come back."

For Pinard, there's also a research component attached to the Adventure Play Days.

"I'm looking at how our cities can better support children's well-being and health," she said. "And play is one key factor."

Pinard is interviewing parents about their children's experiences with unstructured play.

"By better understanding, you know, how children participate in Adventure Play Days we can offer different types of programs than just typical playgrounds that are usually targeting a specific group age or where kids are maybe getting bored pretty quickly," she said.

Ashley Hurley, a parent who brought her children to a play day at Riverdale Playground, said she thought it was a great idea to organize opportunities for unstructured play.

"I think the biggest barrier at home is the supervision and the mess that it makes," she said.

"So being able to come to a place like this where the materials are provided and the cleanup is done for you, it's a lot more inviting."