Entry #practice

My name is Ms. Jackson and I have worked in the field of youth recreation for six years as a program implementer and creator. My responsibility were to create programs that not only had the youth activity involved but also provided a holistic perspective on life skills and decisions.

Leisure, Play? How can someone begin to separate these three things into different categories? Some would say that one or more interact with each other in every event we do in personal time. In the course of this reading we will narrow our understanding of each term definition before we address how an event can have multiple of these terms comprised together working in harmony forming leisure, recreation, or play.

When considering play, what might come to mind is children playing at a park or in the yard, laughing, cheering, and gleefully enjoying their time with each others. Consider play as being instinctual, built into our primal conditioning to participate in. Stuart Brown used the example cats when describing how play is essential for a holistic rounded life. "Play allows 'pretend' rehearsal for the challenges and ambiguities of life, a rehearsal in which life and death are not at stake." (Brown, 32) Brown found that play was not for practice in hunting but practice for social skills. The interaction of playful reenactments of situations and learning when conditions change is valuable skill to achieve a balanced life. 

The history of leisure  can be found in individual and group times when people had time to participate in activities that were not necessary to sustain life. They had the freedom to freely participate in organized, planned events outside of time preparing fields, shelter, food to maintain the basic necessities of life. In modern times we would consider this time to be vacations, overseas travel, and extravagant activities. The term conspicuous consumption has been used when describing the purchase of time and activities to represent a status in society.