What is play?

I have been thinking a lot about play lately.  Today I did a conference session on play at the sensory table in Mankato, Minnesota at the Midwest Play Conference hosted by Mankato State University.   Whenever I do conferences or workshops for early education venues, I always emphasize play.   This seemed a little different because what is the value of play in a classroom and, more specifically, just in one area of the classroom?

To make sense of play at the sensory table, I have been looking at three episodes of play from the apparatus I wrote about last week: the channel board.  I am astonished with what the children come up with.  Sometimes it is so simple and sometimes it is elaborate and sometimes it warms the heart.

The first episode is a child washing out a metal measuring cup.   The cup has residual mud and she wants to clean it out. 

Washing the cup from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

This is a fairly simple operation, but what does it have to do with play?  Why does she want to clean the cup in the first place?  She will just go back to scoop mud with it and then do it all over again.

The next episode shows a child directing a more complicated operation.  First, the middle channel is padded down with mud.  Once enough mud has been padded down, it is then swept down the channel.   The child directing the action takes a small piece of bark to scrape the remaining mud out of the channel.  She then uses that same piece of curved bark as a sled for a dinosaur and sends it zooming down the clean channel.


Cleaning the dinosaur slide with mud. from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

How does a child begin to create such a complete and elaborate scenario that draws in and accommodates others?  How did the child who is directing the operation ever come up with the steps for cleaning the channel with mud?  Why does one child help and the other watch? Why did the child help even though he was not sure exactly what they were doing?   How did that same child realize that the whole operation was to make the sledding dinosaur go faster?

The final episode is beguiling to say the least.  The child has made a mud birthday cake with a stick for a candle for her bear.  She sings happy birthday to it and then tells the bear to blow out the candle.  Of course, she animates the action herself by holding the bear in front of the candle and blowing.


Happy birthday from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

What gave her the idea to make a birthday cake?  Was it the mud? the pot? the stick for a candle? did she just experience a birthday?  In any case, the joy she feels playing out the episode is palpable.  How can that be?

I am convinced that adults, for the most part, play differently than children.  Adults are much more linear and need external rules for play to hold together and make sense.  For children, if there are rules, they are more internal and very mercurial.  They are expansive and unpredictable.  They are highly idiosyncratic with a deftness for making connections, connections with things and others.  Play for children is not so much a thing as a production.  Through play they produce their own reality, a reality that makes sense of the worlds that surround them: the physical, the social and and the emotional worlds.

In the end, the place where children play may not be so important because they play constantly and everywhere; it is their way of being in the world.  What may be more important is creating the space, the time and the means for uninterrupted play.

New element for the channel board

I have built a couple different channel boards over the years.  The first one I built was made of wood.

One of the main objectives with this type of apparatus was to have children explore how water flowed down and over different textures.

The first one was heavy and cumbersome so I built a second one using lighter materials that were more impervious to water.

For both channel apparatus, I would continually look for something new to fill the channels.  This year, I found something new in a dumpster that looked promising.  I do not dumpster dive much anymore, but I could not resist the plunge when I saw the object below sticking out of  a dumpster.

I had no idea what this was.  It was white; it was metal; and the cross pieces had tiny holes.  I thought if I could nest it in one of the channels, the children would create a beautiful cascade with water gushing through the holes and dancing over the cross pieces.




By pure chance, the new element fit perfectly into one of the channels; all I needed to do was tape it into the channel.  As far as the other channels go, one channel was kept clear and the third channel had DRICORE squares all up and down the channel.

 

I usually set up the channel board with water, but this year I was experimenting for the first time with mud in the sensory table.  The mud was pretty clean as far as mud goes because I used Jurassic Sand to make the mud.  Since Jurassic Sand is so fine, I still thought that as children poured the mud down the ladder-like element, they would still experience the cascading affect, just more of an oozing cascade.

That was not the case at all.  Instead, the mud would not flow over the ladder-like element.  The children put mud inside the little compartments, but when they poured loose mud or water down the channel, water and sand flowed under the cross pieces.

Leave it to the children to invent their own use for all the little spaces created by the cross pieces: a dinosaur ladder

 

I was disappointed because I thought the children would encounter a beautiful cascade.  There are two important lessons here: 1) There are unlimited possibilities for provisioning the channels; 2) No matter what my original idea may be, the children will do with it what they will. 

P.S.  I will be presenting at a virtual conference by Fairy Dust Teaching that begins on July 11th.  It is the fourth year for the conference and can be viewed anytime without travel or hotel costs.  Here is the link to the conference:  https://io156.isrefer.com/go/summer16/tpbedard/

In an effort for full disclosure, Fairy Dust Teaching gives me a % of the registration through this link.  If you register before June 25th you can get a 20% discount on the conference by using the code save20

Party

I have been thinking about retiring for over a year.  One of my big concerns was: What kind of party do I want because I knew the families in our program would want to throw a party.  That was especially true because my colleague and mentor, Lani Shapiro, whom I have worked with for the past eight years, was retiring with me.  Lani was the parent educator in the program and had worked very hard with the families to build a community, a community that looks inward at its values and outward to use those values to build a bigger, more inclusive community.  To be true to our values, we wanted a celebration that included past and present families.  We wanted a celebration that would bring them all together, not to talk about us, but to talk with us and with each other.  We also had an obligation---yes, an obligation---to have the children be an integral part of the celebration.

In early winter, I had a meeting with an group of educators I meet with on a monthly basis to talk about large muscle play in the classroom.  As we were leaving the meeting, one of the members off-evenhandedly asked another member about their adventure play event at his school.  That question was all that was needed for the light to go on.  I had read blogs over the past couple of years that talked about adventure play events.  The one I have seen the most is Pop-up Adventure Play.   It just so happens that the member asking the question is involved in Twin City Adventure Play.  In January, I asked to meet with the group to talk about the possibility of doing our retirement party.  I liked what I heard and asked them to give me a proposal I could send along to our advisory council.  When the advisory council saw the proposal, they were on board immediately.

Fast forward to last Saturday.  Parents had been gathering cardboard boxes of all sizes, cardboard tubes, fabric, sticks, rods, tape and you-name-it for two weeks.   It was time to party.  All the materials were laid out on the lawn.

It might look like a recycling nightmare, but this was the invitation for the children to play.

The coordinator gathered the volunteers for a brief training, a training that encompassed their role in the event.

Essentially they were to act as play workers to step back and monitor the play from the background and to only intervene when play looked dangerous.  They were also encouraged to help other adults step back to let the children play.

Of course, as the children arrived, they knew immediately what to do. No instructions were necessary; no dividing up into groups; no dividing into age groups.  This was their play space to create their own narratives.



As the afternoon progressed, more and more people came and everyone kept busy.  The adults got to visit and the children played.  Old acquaintances were renewed and new friends were made.

There were short bursts of rain throughout the afternoon, but that did not dampen play.  In fact, when it would rain, the adults retreated under the eaves of the school and the children kept right on creating, usually fabricating little shelters from the rain.

At the end, there was a little talking to the group about us and we got to thank the families for all they had given us over the years. 

As I drove home from the event, I could not stop smiling.  I was ecstatic; I was floating on air.  Ostensibly the families had come to celebrate our retirement.  In actuality they came to celebrate a community; a community of families they had helped build over the years that respects children and their rights, that respects others and are not so quick to judge; a community that knows how to build community and will carry on. 

We had well over 400 people who came and went throughout the afternoon.  Sadly, I did not even get to talk to everyone who came.  So let me now say to all of you: thank you for a splendid party.  It was a superb sendoff.

P. S. I need to send a special thank you to Seniz and Damian from Twin City Adventure Play
for creating the framework for our community to pull off this event.  I hope others come to see the value in your work and guidance.

I also need to give a special thank you to the planning committee who spent many hours planning the event not really knowing what would happen but having the faith and conviction to make it happen.  Thank you Nora, Vanessa, Anne, Brianna, Becca, Ella, and Dawn.  You throw a great party!

I dare you

When people ask me what do I use in the sensory table, I say I mostly use sand and water.  I always add that I never mix the two.  The main reason I do not mix the two is because the sand has to be dry before storing it otherwise it will get quite musty.  And to dry the sand out, takes a long time.

I decided to countermand my own maxim this year.  I took the Jurassic Sand and dinosaurs setup and added water to make a beautiful orange mud in the sensory table.

Why would I venture into this uncharted territory in my last few months of teaching?  One of the reasons was to clean the sand.  Jurassic Sand is expensive, but will last forever if it is cleaned every once in a while.  When I put water into the table, the sand was heavier so it stayed on the bottom while the debris floated to the top.

Each day after class, I would prop up one end of the table and that allowed me to scoop off the debris.

Another reason to try the sand and water mix was that I have seen so many great pictures of children playing outside in mud kitchens that I wanted to see if I could recreate that experience inside.

To make this happen, I set out a tub with water for the children to rinse their hands before leaving the area.  I did not want them washing their hands in the sink to prevent sand from going down the drain.


Washing hands from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

The child in the video simply put her hands in the tub and the sand easily rinsed off.  She dried her hands on the towel next to the tub.  When the sand rinsed off, it fell to the bottom of the tub so at the end of class I dumped the water leaving the sand on the bottom of the tub.  I could then scoop it back into the table.  I did not pour the water down the drain, but dumped it outside because, again, I did not want to wreak havoc with the sink drain.

I placed the tub a short distance from the table so the children would use it to rinse their hands rather than use it as an additional place to play.  The only problem was children's hands were not the only things that needed washing.  The dinosaurs did, too.


Washing dinosaurs from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

The child declared that his dinosaur needed cleaning.  He transported it very carefully over the two sensory tables and then quickly closed the gap to the tub all in an effort to minimize dripping on the floor.  He was also joined by another child who also needed to clean his dinosaur.

What is the hallmark of good mud play?  Mud pies---or cakes---of course.  Several children undertook the making of a dinosaur candy cake.


Dinosaur candy cake from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

The sticks sticking up out of the bowl of mud---I mean the cake---were the candles.  The clumps of mud on top of the candles signified that the candles were lit.

One child made a three-layer cake.  She took three different size bowls from the shelves, filled them with mud and then sequentially stacked them to make her cake.  Once the bowls were stacked, she added as much sand as she thought her cake could hold.


Three-layer cake from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

There was a little magic at the end when she poured water with a spoon over her cake: the water diffused the sand so her cake looked smooth and velvety.

Make no bones about it, bringing mud into the classroom is setting the stage for a mess on the floor.

While the sand was wet, I did not even try to sweep it up.  I usually left it over night to dry so it was easy to sweep up and put back in the sensory table in the morning.

Outside mud kitchens are great.  Can you see yourself bringing the mud into the classroom?  I dare you.