Well. I don't have any doubt that the kids are gaining wonderful things from this kind of play. But the level of control of the play seems a bit much--for instance, the reporter noted that if a kid has chosen to play "the baby" in a scenario, but then shifts into a different role midway through, the other kids will "help" the "baby" play the role he/she originally set out to play.
I can see and value the intention behind this--helping kids learn to follow through on a plan, for instance, and helping them play by agreed-upon rules. But for me, part of the joy of play is how it morphs as you go--and how playmates have to make subtle or not-so-subtle adjustments as individual people make new discoveries or decide they want the story to charge off someplace new. I think kids can develop self-control, initiative, and "executive function" without being forced to stick to a prescribed play role for 45 minutes. I also suspect less-controlled imaginative play is a truer reflection of children's actual concerns and dreams. But I guess that kind of play wouldn't be as guaranteed to serve a set, predetermined learning outcome. I know it's also got to be harder to manage that sort of play in a larger group setting.
Around our house, we call pretend play "doing stories," and my husband is right--that has been going on since my son could talk. It started with a set of three toy construction workers, dubbed "Struction Guy," "Struction Gal," and "Struction Beard" by my son. The basic storyline was that one of the 'struction workers got hurt on the job. "Oops! I fall down!" was a refrain I heard hundreds of times. Sometimes they played hooky from the jobsite and did something Bridger and I had recently done, like going raspberry-picking.
We moved on to doing car stories with Matchbox cars and train stories with wooden Thomas trains. We created art car parades with Legos and acted out countless stories of knights and pirates with dress-up clothes.
For most of my son's toddler and preschool years, that was ALL he wanted to do: hours and hours a day of "doing stories." With me--never by himself. It's funny, because aside from a little drawing and writing stories, that was pretty much all I wanted to do as a kid, too. But with Bridger, I often got numbingly bored by the repetitive storylines and found myself wishing, jeez, couldn't we go paint, or do a nice craft, or play a board game every once in a while, just to break things up a little bit? But no. We could not.
As much as I sometimes resisted being pulled into Bridger's make-believe world, I often found out fascinating, wonderful things by playing with him. My son doesn't talk much about his feelings. But when I'd been getting upset with him a lot a few years back, he created a storyline about Lego brothers and sisters who built a beautiful Lego castle out in a forest so they could live away from their parents--because "Their mom and dad yell at them too much." Bridger loved having me act out having the parents drive past the castle and speculate about the master builders who must have created the castle--he loved the parents being too dense to recognize their children's talent and skill. OK, I thought. Points duly noted.
Other times, I was able to find out what questions he was working on, without him having to articulate those questions in words. For a while, he loved to play "The Car Who Doesn't Know Anything." I was a very foolish, innocent car who came into a big city full of more knowledgeable cars, and I had to be shown around and have everything explained to me. This helped me put myself in his shoes and realize how much he wanted to be able to be the authority sometimes. Another time, he went through a spell of wanting me to be a less-fancy Matchbox car who was jealous of the faster, prettier hot-rod Matchboxes. Playing this, I guessed he was working on questions about competition and his own value in relationship to others. Very interesting stuff, and, when I let myself forget about wanting to, say, check my email or sweep the floor, we sometimes really got into a beautiful zone together.
After so many years of wishing Bridger would "do stories" more by himself and not always want me to do them with him, my son seems to have weaned himself to mostly "doing stories" on his own or with other kids. He likes to play castle sometimes with his sister and me, but for the most part I'm becoming more of an onlooker to his imaginary world. He invites me to see the Lego space battle tableaus he's set up on the living room floor, but doesn't ask me to act out the battles with him. And that's fine with me. My challenge now is to remember to come over and look with a smile and genuine interest, even when he yells out, "Come look!" when I'm in the middle of making dinner.
Now it's my daughter who wants me to "do stories" with her, and again, I'm fascinated by what my children work on as they play. Today in the back yard, Cassidy started out wanting to pretend we were characters from "The Boxcar Children" books. But then she decided she wanted to be a ballerina, and I would be a bad knight who wanted to capture her and put her in a dungeon. I'm fascinated by how she is processing the messages from fairy tales, toy catalogs, and even comics (she was utterly enthralled with a Prince Valiant comic strip that showed pretty maidens being carried off by hairy half man-half beasts).
I loved what we did together with the victimized ballerina-in-the-dungeon scenario. Together, we wove a story in which the ballerina escaped and stowed away on a pirate ship (our backyard wooden play structure). The pirates loved her dancing and made her their Pirate Princess and leader. They sailed all over the world, to Italy, Australia, and Antarctica. Everywhere, the Bad Knight turned up and had to be defeated with the help of various allies and stratagems. So Cassidy got to both work out her fascination with and her fear of being victimized, and at the same time, she got to be strong, powerful, and free. I could never in a million years have come up with such a rich learning experience for her on my own. It had to come from her.
What if Cass had been in that Portland classroom, and her classmates had told her, no, you can't switch to being a ballerina, you said you were going to be Violet from "The Boxcar Children"? What if the scenario she wanted to play wasn't one of the choices listed on the wall? What if the teacher had steered Cass away from pretending to be a victim in a dungeon because of the teacher's discomfort with Cassidy choosing such an un-PC role?
I wonder. I wonder.
For more on the power and value of free play, I love the articles "Looking Back Over Twenty Years" by Alison McKee and "And They Played All Day" by Naomi Aldort, which you can find at http://www.alisonmckee.com/articles.html#general and http://www.naomialdort.com/articles.html. You have to scroll down a bit to get to these particular articles. Sorry these aren't direct links--I haven't figured out how to post links yet. I'll work on it.
Keep on playing, and please share your own stories, too!
1 comment:
Why is it that schools manage to constantly muck up the good stuff? That's what comes of having "learning outcomes" be guiding forces. (Rather than allowing natural learning outcomes to unfold organically.)
When schools (and people) don't value open-ended play, I have to wonder: why do they think kids throughout history and across cultures have played? It's wired into us for a reason: it's how we learn. And when you try to get in the way of that play, you get in the way of learning.
Your post shows that, beautifully.
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