Lessons Learned from "Not a Box" Play Parties

A handful of lessons learned so far from Southeast's weekly "Not a Box" Play Party for those ages 5 and under:

• Not everyone enjoys wearing pig masks.
• A jump rope tied to a plastic ring does not make a good fishing tool.
• A jump rope tied to a plastic cone makes a somewhat better fishing tool.
• When you lie on your back and pretend the ceiling is the floor, scarves still do not fall “down” to the ceiling.
• Denser objects are more likely to hit the ceiling when you throw them upwards.
• The ceiling tiles in our meeting room are pretty sturdy.
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• Boys love wearing fairy wings and tutus just as much as girls.
• Hula hooping is hard.
• When you yell “surprise!” every time a new person enters the room, they are surprised.
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• You can't put bubbles in your pocket and take them home. 
• When you dump a bunch of balls from one bucket of water to another and refer to them as “water cookies” people will trade you stuff for them.
• Magnets still work, even if they get wet.
• When you add a jester hat, elephant ears, rainbow-colored boa, sun glasses and a pig’s tail to the librarian's head she looks totally insane.  
• No matter how much you huff and you puff, you cannot blow over a solid wood table.  
• There are way too many As in the English language. What’s up with all the A’s?
• Rubber ducks float. Stuffed alligators sink.
• When you guess that if you tie a heavy magnet to a stick that it won’t break, you’ve formed a hypothesis.  When the stick breaks because the magnet was too heavy, you have evidence that your hypothesis was incorrect.  
• Rules were made to be broken!

Want to see these lessons in action and join us as we learn some more? Drop by the Southeast Neighborhood Library at 4 p.m. every Tuesday.

To read more about the value of constructive play in the library, check out The Importance of Play.