I love that children got a chance to experience and work through the conflict of the bike. That is the slow work that is truly needed! This is our issue with the swings at our school. While I was letting children decide some teachers stepped in and changed the rules to have a 5 minute rule. We should slow down and give time to work through a conflict rather than dictate a solution.
yeah... that five minute rule imposed by teachers actually does such a great disservice to children. I have known some preschools that removed ALL their swings because children were fighting over them.
To me these fights are the perfect opportunity to work with the children to discuss rules... and whether they help or not...
for instance we could ask about the five minute rule - does it apply always, or ONLY if other children are waiting? Does this mean that children cannot play anything else because they have to visibly show they are waiting? Does this mean it steals their time to play from them? How do children know it's five minutes? Does this mean they are now dependent on an adult policing the play, rather than being autonomous. Is five minutes longe enough to swing? Is five minutes too long to wait? Why does time feel different depending on what we are doing? How can we make the waiting time more fun? Does this mean swinging could be for longer than five minutes? What if you feel sad and the only way you are going to feel happy again that day is with a long swing? What happens if you feel overwhelmed and the only way to feel calm again is for a long long swing - is it fair that we make these children get off the swing after 5 minutes when 20 minutes is maybe the best for them? Are there other ways to swing? All of these questions we can ask the children - in fact these are the dialogues we should be having with the children so that they can understand the complexity of play and being social while trying to evolve as a human.
It's great that the cities provide this kind of parks for children. We're I live, yes we have many parks, but many so alike. There's not much variety. The playground at our school needs TONS of work. After this video, you got me thinking, how can we provided all these different kinds of opportunities? What materials do we have already that we could use? Thanks a lot for sharing!
What an amazing strategy! That is what is missing from our field trip evaluations. We need to get the children to evaluate to guide our understanding. It also helps children to feel a sense of agency and to practice communicating their thoughts about their own experiences.
it's such a fun thing to do... we had individual log books for their own thoughts, we also had a growing play-space/excursion book, which essentially was a folder that we kept adding information to when we visited a new space - it would include photos, the average score (and date, plus weather, because we learned sometimes that weather had a lot to do with the playability of a space) and then some stand out likes and/or dislikes.
This was then available for the children to look through, they could then make decisions about where to go based on what they wanted to play. it was a very basic "book"
I love that children got a chance to experience and work through the conflict of the bike. That is the slow work that is truly needed! This is our issue with the swings at our school. While I was letting children decide some teachers stepped in and changed the rules to have a 5 minute rule. We should slow down and give time to work through a conflict rather than dictate a solution.
yeah... that five minute rule imposed by teachers actually does such a great disservice to children. I have known some preschools that removed ALL their swings because children were fighting over them.
To me these fights are the perfect opportunity to work with the children to discuss rules... and whether they help or not...
for instance we could ask about the five minute rule - does it apply always, or ONLY if other children are waiting? Does this mean that children cannot play anything else because they have to visibly show they are waiting? Does this mean it steals their time to play from them? How do children know it's five minutes? Does this mean they are now dependent on an adult policing the play, rather than being autonomous. Is five minutes longe enough to swing? Is five minutes too long to wait? Why does time feel different depending on what we are doing? How can we make the waiting time more fun? Does this mean swinging could be for longer than five minutes? What if you feel sad and the only way you are going to feel happy again that day is with a long swing? What happens if you feel overwhelmed and the only way to feel calm again is for a long long swing - is it fair that we make these children get off the swing after 5 minutes when 20 minutes is maybe the best for them? Are there other ways to swing? All of these questions we can ask the children - in fact these are the dialogues we should be having with the children so that they can understand the complexity of play and being social while trying to evolve as a human.
It's great that the cities provide this kind of parks for children. We're I live, yes we have many parks, but many so alike. There's not much variety. The playground at our school needs TONS of work. After this video, you got me thinking, how can we provided all these different kinds of opportunities? What materials do we have already that we could use? Thanks a lot for sharing!
What an amazing strategy! That is what is missing from our field trip evaluations. We need to get the children to evaluate to guide our understanding. It also helps children to feel a sense of agency and to practice communicating their thoughts about their own experiences.
it's such a fun thing to do... we had individual log books for their own thoughts, we also had a growing play-space/excursion book, which essentially was a folder that we kept adding information to when we visited a new space - it would include photos, the average score (and date, plus weather, because we learned sometimes that weather had a lot to do with the playability of a space) and then some stand out likes and/or dislikes.
This was then available for the children to look through, they could then make decisions about where to go based on what they wanted to play. it was a very basic "book"