Play for children is changing with the trend towards keeping children indoors or in highly supervised and planned outdoor spaces.  Play is also disappearing with the goal of teaching formal academics at earlier and earlier ages.  No longer do children roam the woods or even their neighborhoods alone or with other children.  For a vast majority of history children were raised in hunter-gatherer societies where children watched adults engaged in meaningful work and learned how to be adults and contributing members of their society from those experiences with adults, elders, and people of all ages.  We now have a society where children are constantly supervised by adults who are not engaged in anything meaningful other than supervision, a place where same age children are grouped together for purposes of learning, and a society where free play is extremely limited.  Because of all of this, Acorn Village believes that a crucial part of childhood is missing and that there are serious consequences to the interruption of all things young children learn through play.