“Gardening is one of the things I do to relieve stress, so I made a flower.“,wrote Sophia after playing with large pieces of colorful fabric and black plastic shavings in a Kiwanis LET’s PLAY workshop. It happened at the Florida Kiwanis District Annual Convention on August 9, 2025. Following are photos and reflections that help to convey the value and power of play in the lives of young children and the adults who serve them.
Hands-on play with discarded materials collected from local businesses, such as fabric and plastic shavings, is a surprisingly relaxing and enjoyable form of spontaneous creative self expression, I am amazed at the aesthetic appeal this colorful flower evokes in me. I appreciate the emotional connection Sophia makes between her play and the gardening she enjoys.
Play is a source of creative energy! Play is a positive force and safe context for constructing meaningful self-knowledge! Play is a way of revitalizing the human spirit across the whole, blooming human life-cycle!!!
“Started out with wood blocks as a base and put on a foam “roof” to build a sort of house structure. Added some strips of cloth and yarn as softer materials to create a decorative effect. Added some small cylinders to look like a bowling alley. The combination of the tactile feel and the soft music created a sense of relaxation, similar to yoga meditation.”
As described by David in his journal, transforming thought into an aesthetically pleasing visual expression, and then using language to describe meaning and value, is an example of higher-order creative thinking, which results in a sense of relaxation, “similar to yoga meditation”.
Play’s intrinsic qualities include spontaneity of the spirit, thinking deeply, feeling intensely, and building a trust in one’s intuitive self.
Joel was sitting beside his friend David and began building a structure with little wooden blocks. You can see Joel’s hands in the background of the above photo. The experience brought back a powerful memory from a long time ago.
“This experience reminded me of 17 years ago. Two months after I joined Kiwanis making a new garden of flowers being planted. The elementary school across the street sent their students over and had them plant different types of flowers with us. It really touched me when the students asked if they could help or show them how to plant them, The experience really touched me that this is what Kiwanis really is, helping children and the community.“
Play is a source of creativity and happy thoughts that arise spontaneously within us as reminders of earlier joyful encounters. Play is a source of energy for rekindling love, passion, and relationships with other people. These feelings are not just isolated to the play space but also move forward and influence the player beyond the play space into their realities.
For Channon, “This gave me the experience to create my own space, free of clutter, designed for me. A place to go to be alone to escape from all the noise and be at peace. A place of girly colors that make me feel good! It’s symmetrical. I like things to match and be orderly – neat. Feels calm, pretty!
Play is the opportunity to imagine and create, to be free! In those playful moments of joyful authentic sensory engagement. We spontaneously invent and discover inspiring new possibilities for feeling and expressing joy with sense of control in our lives.!
Experiences within the play space elicit feelings of protectiveness, a yearning to return, and a desire for further exploration of higher levels of understanding and self-awareness.
In his jouraling Jerry wrote “I have an engineering, problem-solving, mind that is usually thinking about 1 million different things at once. This experience allowed me to focus on a single objective, and forget for a moment, all the other things on my mind, I chose to build as I like to think of how things are put together into a system, and how they interact with each other.“
Play with three-dimensional materials enhances our capacity to focus, to pay attention, and engage in creative contemplation, and dynamic three-dimentional construction. Play’s intrinsic qualities include spontaneity of the spirit, thinking deeply, feeling intensely, and building trust in one’s intuitive self.
Pat defines his play experience as,”Creating something out of anything! Working with bits and pieces to make art, is quite relaxing, especially the 60 second pause, sticks, fabric, yarn, and caps, wood blocks.”
Fiddling with open-ended objects calms the mind and relaxes the body. It is a way of reducing stress and anxiety, Play and art making reconnect us with a sense of creative purpose, competence, and wisdom.
Janet played with large colorful shapes of foam and wrote, “I allowed the materials to dictate what I wanted to build. It became a vision and using random shapes made it seem as if it were a cartoon playing out in my mind. Very creative imagery, very calming.“
Play allows the mind to act out creative three-dimensional images, ideas. and stories in a way that bring awareness and delight to us, and strengthens our creative capacities to render them real.
Ron wrote, “I wanted to build a structure that was pleasing to the eye yet durable. My stairs are inverted for the entry to cause a person to work to get, but after entry, to be a place of relaxation.“
To create something pleasing to the eye, durable, and a place of relaxation is what this play gifts to us. We see and feel in the play and what we make, the meaning we value and create in our lives.
Play for Walter was, “Relief of stress, slowed down fast pace of day, allowed focus on one thing, Made me think of something other than what I had been thinking of earlier.“
The physical, sensory influence of self active play with three-dimensional, open-ended materials in many various forms brings us into the present moment. In this way, silent, solitary play is an open-eyed, hands-on form of meditation, a contemplative mindfulness practice involving self-recognition.
Melissa shares with us a journalized memory of her play, “We were chatting during the workshop today about libraries. I started creating an enormous bookshelf that morphed into the main structure of the library. I made tables, and chairs, a rug with flex seating and imagined kids and adults alike coming to the library to experience a larger-than-life book. Hopefully, they are transported to a happy place.
Do you see the enormous bookshelf with rows of books and colorful covers? Driftwood, bits of fabric, and wooden blocks give form to earlier conversation leading to creative self expression. The science of play and aesthetics of art appear spontaneously in imaginative play as simple arrangements, compositions seemingly, effortlessly rendered, yet contain and reveal, to ourselves and others, the content of our experience.
Winnie shares her thoughts, “I began with thoughts of an outside stage but it changed to more traditional with people in acting groups. The driftwood reflected the primitive nature of the environment – purple people, the actors.
In Winnie’s comments, as well as in all the other photo stories in this writing, there is evidence of unique, creative, imaginative thinking and storytelling with personal meaning. This is literacy being made in the making and doing of play. Play is a form of communication that reveals the science and art of play as it happens with each participant.
Denwood journaled, “Thought I would attempt to mix materials to build a kind of nonsense structure, testing different “building blocks” while keeping the structure from toppling. Also attempted to incorporate a variety of materials.“
Denwood’s “sort of nonsense structure”, reminds me of the cantilevered architecture of “Fallingwater”, a home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that sits partly over a waterfall. Seeing these play images and comments from Kiwanis friends inspires me. I feel interested and connected with each of these little stories. This is what happens when children play and share their stories about what make and how they feel, There is power and delight in the freedom of these simple acts of self discovery. It’s a way of building a healthy community!
There are many more stories to be told. Every community benefits from play! Every community has reusable resources that can be collected and reused to enrich play and storytelling in the lives of both young children and adults. I am grateful to the Kiwanis Children’s Fund, the Florida Kiwanis Foundation, the Wil and Rachel Blechman Fund, Florida Kiwanis Clubs, the Florida Association for the Education of Young Children Play Chapter, and a growing network of partnerships with Florida manufacturers and businesses for supporting play and leading the way!
Drew Thoughts 