Grady has a new boundless playground - St. Petersburg Times

Grady has a new boundless playground - St. Petersburg Times

""They would watch, they would laugh, they would talk across," said school principal Melanie Bottini, "but they couldn't play alongside."

I am sure that the decision makers of our professional education system understand the difference between parallel play and cooperative play.


Parallel Play
Parallel play (or parallel activity) is a term that was introduced by Mildred Parten in 1932 to refer to a developmental stage of social activity in which children play with toys like those the children around them are using but are absorbed in their own activity and usually play beside rather than with one another. Children in this stage may comment on what they are doing or imitate what another child does, but they rarely cooperate in a task or engage in dramatic play or formal games with others. This stage occurs after solitary and onlooker play and before associated and cooperative play when children engage in more complex social interactions. Preschool children of all ages engage in parallel play, particularly when using sand, water, blocks, and art materials; this type of play appears to serve as a bridge to more complex cooperative activities.


Cooperative play:

......"In the second year of life, human infants become true social partners with one another for the first time. Between 18 and 24 months of age, children begin to engage in unique, nonritualized, cooperative interactions with peers (agemates), and this development appears to be universal (Brownell & Carriger 1990; Eckerman et al. 1989; Eckerman & Whitehead 1999). Thenceforth, peer play and interaction become progressively more central as a context for socialization. It can be argued, in fact, that children’s peer play enables and drives enculturation as much as does adult-child interaction (Tomasello et al. 1993)."

Found here


We should be thankful for the tireless efforts of the few who are professional educators, even when the ones with the most effort are parents.

"......Grady, however, is the first school in Hillsborough County to have a "boundless" playground.

Both projects were initiated by Stefani Busansky, whose first child, Sarah, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy in 2001....."