Thank you everybody and good afternoon. I’m very happy and honored to be here with you all. I’m sure some of you have already seen me from the lunch this morning. So you know, as the director of Play This Week, thank you Ann for that wonderful title by the way. I think we should jump in and play, right? So how about we play a game and the game is called Stand Up If. Alright? Stand Up If. Okay? So in this game of Stand Up If and I see some nods, so that means that some of you are already familiar with this game. Okay? So in this game of Stand Up If, I’m going to give a series of comments or statements and if that’s true for you, I want you to go ahead and stand up. Okay? Or move in any way that you can to kind of signal that you are in agreement. Alright? Now at which, then I would like you to just kind of stand and pause for a minute and look around the room and see who else shares in that same statement. Okay? So we’ll go through a series of questions and then we’ll talk about what play means to us. Alright? Sound good? Alright. So if I can have the house lights up just a little bit so we can kind of see folks. I’d love to see everybody and so that people can see each other as they stand up. So Stand Up If you had to fly to come to this conference. Awesome. Okay, go ahead and sit down. Stand Up If you had to travel internationally to be at this conference. Awesome. Thank you. Stand Up If you’re a parent. So play can be very important to us in this room, right? Alright, thank you. Stand Up If at any point in time over this year you found yourself rocking out, singing along and being caught by the driver next to you in your car. Well, maybe not getting caught but letting them see your karaoke skills. Alright. Stand Up If you’ve had a chance to play in the last week. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Stand Up If you have a booty bump partner. Alright, so take a look at these folks. They have a booty bump partner for life. Now how often can you come to a conference and leave with a booty bump partner for life? Alright. So I want you to take a moment right now and just think about that game. Like what did we notice about in those moments of play that we just had? What were some of the things that we noticed? Did you feel something during that game? Sharing experiences. Right. So we found some commonalities as we played this game. Right. Did you see yourself changing as far as your physicality in the way that you reacted to those statements? Yeah. Right. Think about where your head was during that game. Was it thinking about all the things that were happening, the noise that happens in our life? Or where were we in that moment? In the moment. Right. So when we think about play, and I’ve had the honor and the opportunity to be a trainer for Playworks, which Elizabeth had just spoke about. And so in the last five or six years, my job has been to travel the country and work with adults and talk about play and teach and train adults on play and what it means to our kids and how we can make play more inclusive, more positive, building the culture of, you know, that positive that we want our kids to experience at schools. And a lot of times when I come to these trainings, I’ll have an audience of a pretty mixed group. I’ll have principals and school level teachers and I’ll have, you know, recess paraprofessionals. And a lot of them, you know, come to this training, not really knowing what to expect. Right. And the majority of them really never even speak to each other throughout their entire day. Right. They don’t have any connection other than whatever their program or role is at their school or at their site. Right. I’ve even had people walk in because I have, you know, my space taped out with games and cones laid out and I had one person walk in and go, Nope, God. And I’m like, What? You haven’t even tried it. Right. But yeah, so so you get this kind of mixed group of people who like, don’t really have that chance to talk or communicate. And so we we teach games during this time so that they can understand how games are played and how they can bring it back and make it more inclusive and positive. But the one thing that I always realize that when I do these trainings is not so much what they learn about the games. It’s what they learn about each other. Right. It’s how they interact in that time and space with one another. It’s what they do to connect. Right. So when we think about play, we should be thinking of beyond the point of its games and activities that are for fun. It is the platform that allows for us to connect socially, emotionally. Right. It is the one thing that we know that makes communication good, because we can understand our folks socially and emotionally, we’re connected to them. Right. And so for us to have that great sense of communication, when we play, we’re going to learn each other’s communication styles. So this week, I encourage you to come out and play with us. Right. We’re going to have wonderful games that are going to be about cooperation and strategizing and networking and team building. But really, it’s just about making the connection. Right. So I leave you with two quotes. One, we don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing. You’ve heard that one. Right. So we are never too old to play. So get out and play. All right. The other one I’m going to leave you with is you can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. So take an hour and join us and come up to recess. Thank you.