Gone are the days when all the kids in the neighbourhood ran home, dropped their bags after school and went outside to play with all the other kids. Between after school childcare, structured lessons, sports and video games most kids are too busy to join in neighbourhood play.
One thing that was a skill naturally picked up was adaptability. Adapting to change, adapting to environment, adapting to other kids wishes and requests during play is bessential in the outdoors classroom. Unstructured, unsupervised play was only possible if the kids were able to adapt and change their play according to the conditions that day.
How was this learned in free play?
Peter Gray in his book, Free To Learn talks about true play being the ability to leave play. It used to be you had complete freedom to leave, you could go home or go to another friend’s house or yard. While being in child care means you can withdraw from the play happening, most centres have a list of rules that for safety or convenience have to be followed. Children have to stay within the play yard or the house/centre building. Children have to share, have to participate in group time or activities together without the freedom to withdraw. Kids before, in unsupervised and unstructured play, had to work harder and be adaptable to other kids needs and wants to keep the participants there. They learned if they were inflexible they were often left alone.
When playing outside with friends there were constant obstacles- the ball was not inflated- the fort wouldn’t stay up - falling into the creek meant a soaker. Without parents or adults standing around making suggestions of how to get to the ball to inflate, what was wrong with the fort or how to make a wet boot more comfortable or come to the rescue with an extra pair, kids were left to come up with solutions and adapt themselves or their play materials to continue having fun. Adults are really good problem solvers and sometimes are regulated into having to help (health and safety issue - to walk in a wet boot as my childhood blistered feet could tell you). Other times it is just an adult’s desire to “do something” as Zoe Arnold talked about in “What’s your role?” On our first podcast.
Learning for adults is different than learning for kids. When children are outside they learn many valuable things and have the possibility to learn in any direction without having to worry about adult approval. They can learn without adults knowledge of the correct information or adults often misguided understanding of where the learning is going or that it was even desired to be going somewhere.
To be able to watch a butterfly emerge from a cocoon without having to learn names or stages. To be able to figure out why your fort is leaking without having to learn about waterproofing or best engineering principles. It is the magic of learning . When you come across the information later, either through interest or planned play you have wisdom with you from experience to understand instead of applying learned knowledge to tasks . This only increases your ability to do a task by following instructions.
In today’s time it is hard to capture the magic of play unstructured and unsupervised but check our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Childonground to get links to my podcast. We will chat this February on the podcast, blogs and newsletter so you can find out how you can create similar situations to increase adaptability for your kids or your home daycare / daycare center.
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