What is playing really about?
Free-play, creativity, development, resilience and growth-mindset: the links for children and adults.
School holidays are rapidly approaching.
Schools have been restricted in what activities they can provide to nurture children’s imaginations.
After more than a year in and out and in and out and…of school, everyone is exploring more ways to keep the family occupied, stimulated and educated.
There are lots of ideas hints, tips, products and apps designed to keep everyone happy.
From Art to Zoom Zumba there is someone out there ready to offer or sell ideas and advice.
You may have noticed that art and creativity are in my bones. Over the next few weeks, I will be putting together a list of some of the activities that I found to be the most popular when shared with others. Some of them will be activities for small groups some will be aimed at individuals. All will be enriching for both adults and children or a mixture! All of them have been tried by me and children up to the age of 11. Some of them you will be very familiar with, and you may be able to give me a few tips to help me and the other readers.
Being a freelance copywriter and content writer, I have the luxury of sometimes being able to write what I want when I want.
Yes, I'm happily busy most of the time writing for other people but I do have free time to write for myself.
So, while I have a moment, I would like to share with you some of my most precious creative moments that I was able to be part of.
I hope to inspire some creative moments for you to share with others.
First, I feel I need to introduce you to the why before the what.
Put another way,
why art? Why encourage creativity? What has play got to do with art and creativity?
Why art and creativity the way I facilitate it?
When our children are very young we give them things that are bright noisy and tactile.
This all helps with brain development so our nurseries and playrooms are filled with lights, buzzes, pings and twangs in a rainbow of texture and stimulation.
And then they go to school.
In the early years they have mud kitchens and water play, dress-up and paint. Imagination is nurtured and facilitated. Exploration and discovery are given special places that are treasured.
BUT by the time they are aged around 7 most of this has stopped.
In exchange children are put on the road to GCSEs.
GCSE AT 7??? I hear you shout!
That’s a bit of an exaggeration to be honest but it gives a clearer picture of what it’s like for children in schools. The staff are under such pressure to show progress academically, everything else goes out of the window.
It’s such a pity…for everyone.
The children miss a valuable part of growing up and developing. The teachers don’t get to see the whole child. We will all pay the price in the future.
If the children are lucky, they will get an hour or so per week of prescriptive ‘art’ or ‘D&T’ with a particular outcome that will be assessed.
This is rarely, if ever, the teacher’s choice; it’s just how it is, in UK state education…mostly.
Tech, and gaming, and education software are developed by creative people.
They have the power to shape our futures as much as the chemists, physicists, biologists, philosophers, clerics and politicians. Look it up.
As children grow and develop
Our children’s playthings become ever more sophisticated the older our children get; creativity and discovery are pared down and subdued, replaced by rules, guides, instructions and restrictions.
Think about the massively-popular little, colourful building bricks
(several brands are available).
There is a theme park designed around them.
There are highly complex kits to build specific representations of vehicles, buildings etc many of which are coveted by adults!
There are therapies designed around them to help children with behaviour difficulties.
Here’s the thing:
Where did the imagination go? The endless possibilities?
A generation (or two) are being introduced to these magical means of manipulation, construction, art, design, imagination as a set of instructions with a pre-existing outcome.
Follow the instructions and you too can have exactly the same as everyone else.
Don’t get me wrong!
I couldn’t wait to get hold of my brother’s little bricks to build houses with gardens and gates. My children loved them, and it was my favourite ‘play with mom time’.
But these were playtimes with endless possibilities. They were big, jumbled rattling and clattering boxes to be rooted through for exactly what our imaginations told us we needed.
Wheels—mine had to sit on wheels…
There have been many studies that looked at opportunities for free imaginative play, and many concluded that it is in decline and this has a detrimental effect on children’s development.
Particularly, their ability to problem-solve, and build resilience when things become difficult. Social interactions are limited to competitive feats; sports, academic achievement and workplace ladder climbing, data driven productivity
Learning rules and routines is obviously a good thing.
But it is equally so for negotiating skills, problem solving, exploration and discovery: these things are much more likely to occur when free-play is facilitated.
There is a list of peer reviewed articles at the bottom of this blog.
Children need to be bored.
The more we orchestrate their play the less able they are to construct their own scenarios, encounter problems and devise solutions.
These are the skills needed to help them understand and use the rules and routines of science, maths and English and life in general—creatively.
Einstein didn’t get where he got to by just following rules. He was a creative thinker, an explorer, he discovered because he was an explorer.
I’m sure this exploration led to some disappointments and failures, but he continued to bounce back and try again.
We should be facilitating and enabling creative play.
I have worked in education for many years.
I had practiced what I am preaching on my own children and with those I worked with.
I was at the end of my degree when I came across the many articles of research into what I already did instinctually.
If you are a parent, you might find it useful to ask your children’s school about opportunities for free play, especially for the ‘older’ children, over 7…
There are signs that some schools are starting to implement changes.
I have to question; why so late to the party?
Look at the dates of some of the research into play!
The answer lies with those that govern what schools can and can’t do, how much time they allow teachers to implement ‘new’ initiatives and what schools are allowed to relax on in order to set the wheels in motion.
Those that pull the strings, give directives, shape policy rarely seek any insight into children’s lives. If they do, they are very clever at hiding it.The information is available, but they choose to take no notice. League tables and statistics are the driving force behind our children’s futures.
I’m not trying to say I know it all.
I am saying that what I thought was right was also tested, researched and it verifies my opinion; in accordance with British Educational Research Association (BERA) https://www.bera.ac.uk/
I just didn’t know it at the time!
Over a number of years, I developed or encouraged activities that nurtured growth, mentally.
You may be aware of Carol Dweck and her research on growth-mindset. (I will put a link to many of her articles at the bottom of the page.)
Play, creativity and discovery are all roots of the growth-mindset tree:
resilient young people are the fruit.
‘If they aren’t given the opportunity to try, if they never have the opportunity to fail, they never have the opportunity to find out how powerful they are.’
Over the coming weeks I will share with you some of the things I did.
Some of the activities the children enjoyed.
Some of them (most of them) are messy: this is good.
You may want to do them yourself
Most are based around the philosophy I wrote about here.
Don’t expect to be surprised.
You are probably doing a lot of these things already, or you did them yourself as a child.
I hope that what I will be sharing, along with this article, will validate what you do, as I was validated when I discovered all the research.
We often undervalue, or are undervalued in, what we know, sometimes it takes a certificate to prove that we know it.
Sometimes it just takes us to ‘grow a pair’ and just do it.
A little classroom story
Children were tasked with making collages from coloured paper.
Class A had baskets on each table filled with coloured paper cut into small pieces, 1 colour in each basket.
Class B had a pile of different coloured paper sheets in the centre of each table.
The end of each lesson had a completely different outcome although the objective was the same.
Class A had more completed collages than Class B.
Both had tidy classrooms at the end.
On the surface the Class A had a better lesson, more completed work, where the neatly cut paper was placed more or less in the right place inside the pre-printed outline. Almost 20 uniformly similar pieces to display on the wall.
Class B’s art lesson was loud with the sound of tearing paper, scrunching and crunching.
Decisions had to be made about size and placement.
They learned how paper tears in different ways depending on how they held the paper, which direction and how fast or hard they pulled.
Different shaped paper made different patterns and textures.
They learned it is hard to get it the same as your friend, or the teacher, or how they imagined it in their heads.
Some cut with scissors and learned that matching shapes with scissors is hard.
They problem solved
Made decisions
Shared
Argued
Were selfish
Were generous
Felt textures
Discovered paper can be strong and fragile all at the same time.
They learned that it doesn't always work the first time.
Small pieces of paper were better than big pieces…sometimes.
Both classes had a wonderful afternoon.
Class B’s lesson had so many hidden opportunities for development: creatively, socially, physically, emotionally and academically, that were missing from, or less rich in, class A’s lesson.
There is nothing more relevant than the adage that the children love the box more than the toy.
If you have anything you want to say about what you have read in this blog, please leave a comment.
Research articles on play and development.
Barbara Chancellor (2013) Primary school playgrounds: features
and management in Victoria, Australia, International Journal of Play, 2:2, 63-75, DOI:
10.1080/21594937.2013.807568
https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2013.807568
Saralea E. Chazan (2012) The children's developmental play
instrument (CDPI): a validity study, International Journal of Play, 1:3, 297-310, DOI:
10.1080/21594937.2012.692204
https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2012.692204
Helle Skovbjerg Karoff (2013) Play practices and play moods, International
Journal of Play, 2:2, 76-86, DOI: 10.1080/21594937.2013.805650
https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2013.805650
Jonas Holst (2017) The dynamics of play – back to the basics of playing,
International Journal of Play, 6:1, 85-95, DOI: 10.1080/21594937.2017.1288383
https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2017.1288383
Sally Howe (2016) What play means to us: Exploring children’s perspectives
on play in an English Year 1 classroom, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal,
24:5, 748-759, DOI: 10.1080/1350293X.2016.1213567
https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2016.1213567
Monica M. Smith (2016) Playful invention, inventive play, International Journal
of Play, 5:3, 244-261, DOI: 10.1080/21594937.2016.1203549
https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.201 6.1203549 einstein
Articles by Carol Dweck https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=carol+dweck+scholarly+articles&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart