PLIX Play Cafe: Beautiful Symmetry!

Activities Beautiful Symmetry 🐝
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Welcome to the first PLIX Play Cafe series, on Beautiful Symmetry!

We’ll be using the forum as a space to share our creations, ideas, and reflections to support asynchronous connections, inspire each other, and grow a resource for the larger PLIX community.

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For today’s Play Cafe on Beautiful Symmetry, these are some of our playful activities:

Here are some ways our pen pals may share on this thread:

  • Pictures of your doodles
    Bonus: we may turn some of these into stickers to share out at the end of the Play Cafe!
  • Pictures of your version of the activity
    During or after the Play Cafe!
  • Pondered Wonderings
    To our question above
  • Playfulness
    Emojis, ideas, stray thoughts, and more :heart:
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In today’s Play Cafe, we got to take some time to explore patterns and playfulness with each other! I loved hearing how play manifests in others’ lives, with examples ranging from energetic dogs to vibrant colleagues (Ada!). I really enjoy the Beautiful Symmetry idea because often we think of play as abstract and having no limits or rules–which is true–but this activity beautifully (haha) melds pattern rules and creativity. In my experience, people that say they struggle with creativity are often blocked by the popularized versions of how to be creative (e.g. artistic abilities, unlimited supply of ideas, unique perspectives). This activity is a perfect example of how anything can be play and how creativity can have simple, non-abstract rules and structure that can sometimes lower the barrier to creativity. Below is the product of a few simple rules I came up with with the help of some cute little cows, circles, and hearts, and it was so fun to make! Thanks for a wonderful time!

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Also a look at some of my doodles during the activity! Can’t wait to look at what other people saw in these little blobs :eyes:

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Darn I missed it. Maybe I didn’t sign up in time :frowning:

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It was wonderful yesterday to hear about the different ways our pen pals are staying playful in their lives, in particular, we learned that one library has been offering their playful family programming to families staying at hotels. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Looking forward to seeing other games people came up with their paper pieces!

Also, for the doodles: here’s a hammerhead fish and a chicken horse

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Hi @JacquiV! Do check your physical mailbox for the pink envelope, and your personal gmail for the email we sent out earlier this week.

Let me know if you run into any trouble, and feel free to join us for next week!

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My pink letter arrived yesterday :weary: But I will be there next time!

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For June 28’s Play Cafe, these are some of our playful activities:

  • Having tea, drinks, and snacks together
  • Zoom Peer Play:
    • Doodling with the Zoom whiteboard feature
  • Doodling:
    • “Draw what you see!”
  • Wonder:
    • What symmetries do you see in the items you collected? Why is there symmetry in nature?
  • PLIX Activity:
    • Beautiful Symmetry Collected Nature Patterns (Radiating Energy, and Fantasy Habitats for Cows)
  • Resource:

Here are some ways our pen pals may share on this thread:

  • Pictures of your doodles!
    Bonus: we may turn some of these into stickers to share out at the end of the Play Cafe!
  • Pictures of your version of the activity!
    During or after the Play Cafe!
  • Pondered Wonderings
    To our question above
  • Playfulness
    Emojis, ideas, stray thoughts, and more <3
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Here are my doodles from last week. Just not the kind of day where I could make the meeting this week, but I’m missing it!

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Here’s my mandala with cows and layering because my desk is messy

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That’s beautiful Jacqui!! Love the blue paint and so many awesome colors from nature :heart_eyes:

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Here’s my nature mandala from today!

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Here’s mine!

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mine is digital :stuck_out_tongue:

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Cactus and Succulent Society of MA

Cactus Physics

Fibonacci Numbers vs Lucas Numbers

Magnetic Cactus

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I was totally fooled by the wood desk background!