All The Blocks

“But they’ll take out all the blocks.”

Yes, they sometimes will. Sometimes they’ll take out all the big blocks, and then the little ones. And the animals, and the cars. Sometimes they’ll fit the little blocks inside of the big ones, and line up animals and cars in every empty space they see. 

That’s what the blocks are there for. That’s what all the toys are there for – for the children to use, to play with and to bring their ideas to reality.

I’ve always wondered about teachers’ hesitancy to let children play with all of something.  Teachers choose to limit children’s block play for so many reasons – concerns about safety, about activity level, about sharing. The limits are usually less about the children’s abilities than about the teacher’s feelings of control. And sometimes having all the blocks being used at once seems overwhelming to teachers, as teachers imagine every possible scenario of what could go wrong. Will the children really clean them up? How much space are they using? What happens if they get knocked down?

But instead of worrying about what could go wrong, take moment to consider what is going right.

Yes, they’ll take out all the blocks. And they’ll work together to build some amazing structures. They’ll add details and figure out mathematical relationships and engineering concepts that they can visualize years before they can explain them. They’ll create a space that is theirs. They feel a sense of ownership and pride as they develop the setting for their play, and create something that has the awesome grandness of being big and complicated. They’ll take out all the blocks, and it can be wonderful.

Mindset Not Materials

This week, I gave a talk about introducing “risky play” in early childhood classrooms. I talked about the situations and reasons that first spurred me to think about risky play, I talked about some of the reasons risky play is so important to development, and I talked about some of the different play I’ve observed in my classroom, and some ways that children use materials in physically challenging ways.

What I couldn’t answer though, was how to make this happen.

How do you set up indoor and outdoor environments that encourage children to engage in risk-taking play that allows them to explore ideas of safety, control, and self-regulation? How do you choose materials for this? Most of all, how do you plan for this all to happen? The answer – I don’t know. Of course, some materials lend themselves to open ended problem solving more than others. Teachers can present materials and set up spaces that provoke the question “What can I do with that?” But once a child asks that question, it’s the teacher’s reaction that shapes what happens next.

Education catalogs are full of materials to create beautiful outdoor environments. There are countless blogs and websites with tips on how to create a “Reggio-inspired classroom.” I’ve had discussions with teachers who proudly proclaim that they’ve painted their walls beige, thrown out the plastic toys, and brought tree stumps inside for the children to sit on. All of this might be aesthetically pleasing, but there’s no automatic connection between any of these things and children’s learning and exploration. For learning and exploration to happen, the teachers need to let it happen.

Allowing children to engage in risky or challenging play involves risk on the part of the teacher. The teacher needs to trust that the children know what they’re doing, and that learning will take place. The teacher needs to trust the children’s ideas, and trust that the children are competent to discover their own questions, seek out answers, and use materials in their own creative and innovative ways – even ways the teacher didn’t expect or imagine.

Creative play is about mindset, not materials.

The most creative and thought-provoking materials will lead nowhere if teachers don’t allow them to. There’s nothing magical about a tree stump or a basket of pebbles and shells. The magic comes when children are given the freedom to test their limits – to test the limits of how high they can climb or how far they can jump, how many small pieces they can pour out and spread across the floor, how many combinations and substances they can mix, dump, and fill.

The magic is in testing the limits of innovation, and discovering ways to use materials in a new way, whether they’re sticking toys into playdough or using tempera paint to trace designs up and down their arms. And the magic is in testing out social relationships, as they discover that their words have power and meaning, and sometimes consequences, and learn to navigate the complicated world of interacting with others, some who may be friends, and some who aren’t. 

The magic is in the mindset of the teacher – the teacher who allows the children’s exploration to unfold, and knows how to guide it, not stop it. The materials mean nothing, without the mindset to let the magic happen, to trust in the children that their play will be okay, and it might even be amazing.

Heavy Work

Teachers talk a lot about the value of “heavy work”. Usually those conversations are about helping children with sensory needs or ADHD, or giving children an opportunity to work off extra energy and increase their focus and attention. Framing the conversation this way misses what the true value is of “heavy work”. Children don’t need to work off “extra” energy. Children don’t have extra energy – they have energy, period. Heavy work is a target for energy, a chance for children to take risks, set goals, and see what they can accomplish, putting their greatest energy at work. There isn’t anything magical about heavy work that increases focus. It’s the act of doing a self-selected task that has intrinsic value and that poses a challenge that pushes children to pay attention, because this task is meaningful to the child.

We all seek to challenge ourselves, to push, to pull, to lift, to climb, to reach, to ascend.

For young children, these tasks are often physical, as they test out their developing muscles and coordination, and as they learn to take risks and test out the limits of their developing bodies and abilities.. How high can I reach? How high can I climb? Can I lift this? Can I push this? All these questions have another question at the core: What am I able to do? Or, Can I do things I didn’t even think were possible?

On the playground, we see children doing what is seemingly impossible – trying to pull or push a rock or tree or pole that is immovable. Or is it? Heavy work is more than just pushing something to use up energy and see if it will move. Heavy work is having the opportunity to problem solve and discover whether you can make it move. Or not.

Having the freedom to experiment with trying to move the object is cognitive heavy work, which is just as important as the physical heavy work. The innate drive to go higher, push harder, and to test limits – both our own, and those set for us, is the heavy work that we all have to do.

A Monument to Risky Play

Last week my family visited The City Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. The City Museum isn’t so much a museum in the traditional sense (although they have a great display of architectural artifacts). In the words of its website, the City Museum is “an eclectic mixture of children’s playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel made out of unique, found objects.” From a child’s perspective, it’s a huge, challenging playground made out of really cool stuff.

The cool stuff is salvaged and “found” materials, welded together to make extraordinary climbing apparatus. Indoors, there are multiple levels of artificial caves including child size tunnels to disappear into out of adult reach. Outdoors there are spiral cage like tunnels and slides connecting junked airplanes, cranes, and buses, all dozens of feet in the air. On the roof, ten stories up, are even more of these spiral tunnels and huge slides, suspending you literally a hundred feet over the city.

On first look, this seems like the very definition of risky play, as children explore, discover, and push themselves to figure out ways to complete physical challenges of their own making. But as I watched children wind through the tunnels, it occurred to me that much of the risk is perceived risk not actual risk. Much like an amusement park, it’s thrilling to be a hundred feet off the ground. But completely surrounded by a steel cage, there isn’t any actual risk or danger. The environment is created to challenge children physically and imaginatively, while protecting them from getting hurt.

Not that no one will get hurt. I saw children spill over and bump heads and elbows coming down the slide, or scratch a knee on the edge of a ladder, or get hit in the face by a rubber ball in the ball pit. But part of the nature of risky play is learning to distinguish between levels of risk. Physical challenges involve the risk of a scrape or a bruise, but to raise resilient, competent children, we need to teach them the difference between a puncture wound and a bruise. We need to teach children that exploring challenges and new situations is worth the risk of a minor hurt, whether physical or emotional. And we need to teach children how to respond appropriately to that hurt. A bumped knee, a scratched elbow are something we can recover from, and the play is often worth the risk.

Rules and Reasons

Last week, Teacher Tom wrote a blog post titled “Eleven Things to Say Instead of Be Careful.” The blog was focused on the issue of “risky play”, better described by Teacher Tom as “challenging play” or “safety play”, and he suggested some more descriptive ways of explaining what we mean to children when teachers say, “Be careful.” His first example was “"That's a skinny branch. If it breaks you'll fall on the concrete."

What struck me about this statement isn’t just the clarity and honesty of it, but that a teacher was giving a child an explanation for why they should or shouldn’t do something. So often teachers tell children to do something or not do something, without giving any reason. “Be careful” falls in that category. So do so many other statements, sometimes given as a direction, sometimes worded in a way that relieves the teacher of direct responsibility, without actually giving the child the reason. “Chairs aren't for standing on.” “We wear hats when we go outside.”  “The blocks can’t be higher than your head.” All might be reasonable expectations for children, but wouldn’t they sound even more reasonable if we explained to the children why we’re saying them?

“That chair isn't sturdy enough for you to stand on.”

“I’d like you to wear your hat to keep your head warm.”

“I’m worried that if the blocks are that high, they might fall on your head and hurt you.”

Of course, when we give the children a reason for what we’re saying, we’re opening the door for them to present a counterargument, but isn’t that part of learning how to interact with others in a democratic society? Children need to understand that there are rules, but not that rules are unilaterally imposed on other people without reason. When teachers revert to “it’s the rule” or some version of “because I say so”, children might follow it, but only because of the teacher’s authority, not because of an inherent sense that it’s the right thing to do. If we want to teach children about morality, decision making, and perspective taking, we need to model democracy in our own speech. Rules don’t spontaneously exist, they’re created by people, and they can be changed by people. Perhaps that’s why teachers are so hesitant to let children into the process, because of a fear that even these very young people will try to change the rules and take some authority away from the teacher. I would argue that if the only way you can maintain authority is to remove dissent, that authority isn’t valid, even over children. If we want our children to grow up to understand fairness and reason, we need to include them in the decision making process, even if it’s only by explaining our reasoning to them.

And maybe some of our rules will need to be changed after all.

In Praise of Big Blocks

When my son was four, he loved preschool. One of his only complaints was that he hardly ever got to play with the big blocks. His classroom had a long wall lined with hollow blocks (aka “big blocks”) but that area was only occasionally open for play. “What did you do at school today?” I would ask. Sometimes he would say, “The big blocks were open today!” followed by an excited description of what he had built. But much more often, his first words about his day would be, “The big blocks were closed.”

Hollow blocks are a preschool classroom staple, either in their own area, or combined with unit blocks. But often, teachers discourage or ban their use. Teachers sometimes say that the play gets too out of control. Or that the kids argue too much while building. Or that the themes that children use are too violent, scary, or wild. Or that blocks aren’t safe, because they might fall on someone. When children are allowed to play with big blocks, it’s often with a lengthy set of limits and rules: how many children can play at a time, restrictions on what can be built, and limits on the height or size of a structure.

Why are teachers so scared of big blocks?

Yes, the play can get active. But, just like any other activity, whether it gets “out of control” depends on teacher guidance, interaction, and support. Yes, children will argue about what to build and how to build it, but that social interaction should be a goal, not something to avoid. Negotiation about planning, ideas, themes, and roles are crucial social skills that children learn by doing. Eliminating settings for this negotiation might prevent social conflict, but it also eliminates opportunities for children to practice and improve these skills.

Children are drawn to the big blocks simply because they are big blocks. It takes work to move them – challenging, physical work. Children are drawn to the scale of the big blocks because they can make structures that are their own size and that they can fit on, in, and under. They are captivated by concepts of height and risk. The concern that a block could fall on someone’s head might be expressed as fear by the teacher, but for the child, that concern is turned into a challenge of how to prevent it from happening. Figuring out how to build a strong, stable structure, nearly as big as or even bigger than their own bodies, gives children a chance to express competency, confidence, and skill. It involves imagination, creativity, engineering, and design, all in the context of social interaction, as a group – sometimes a large group – of children discuss, debate, argue, and negotiate about their ideas. 

Yes, the big blocks can be risky. And loud. And wild. But they can also be imaginative, inspiring, thought-provoking, and cooperative. They can be the place in the classroom where rich, collaborative, social play happens. They can be the place where children propose and test ideas and evaluate their results.  They can be the place where children learn how to disagree and discuss differences of opinion. They can be the place where children test their limits and abilities, and push themselves to see what they can accomplish. And we, the teachers, can stand beside them and support them each step of the way.

 

Emotional Risk, Bruised Feelings, Resilient Kids

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about “risky play” – the idea that children need opportunities to engage in play that involves physical risks. Our collective fear of physical injury, however slight, has led parents and schools to limit or ban play that might involve physical risk (or for schools, that might involve liability suits). Recently there has been a push back against the movement to “bubble wrap” our kids, as educators, psychologists, and “free-range” parents extol the virtues of physical play that might involve scrapes and bruises.

But what about play that involves emotional risk?

Even in schools where teachers extol the virtues of climbing trees, stacking rocks, and letting children hang upside down from the monkey bars, teachers are still often vigilant about protecting kids from emotional risk. Rules like “You can’t say you can’t play” and “We use nice words at school”, intentional grouping of children to promote some friendship groups and break up others, and immediate adult intervention if a problem arises (whether it’s a block tower falling down or another child saying they don’t want to sit next to another child) create an environment where children are bubble-wrapped, cushioned, and shielded against sadness, disappointment, or anger.

We’ve confused risk with danger.

As adults, we have a responsibility to protect children from danger. We don’t leave jagged pieces of metal or broken shards of glass within reach. We put guard rails at the top of the slide, and padding under the monkey bars. We use seat belts and car seats. We have a responsibility to try to prevent serious injury, but we can’t prevent every injury. We need to learn, as teachers, parents, and caregivers, to distinguish between a puncture wound and a bruise. Bruises, scrapes, and splinters are unpleasant but non-threatening risks that are part of interacting with the physical world around us. Each bruise or scrape gives a child a chance to assess risk and develop the skill set to avoid a more potentially serious injury the next time around. And each bruise or scrape gives a child a chance to recover.

In The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, psychologist Wendy Mogel writes, “Real protection means teaching children to manage risks on their own, not shielding them from every hazard….If parents rush in to rescue them from distress, children don’t get an opportunity to learn that they can suffer and recover on their own.”

In our drive to keep children from suffering, we’ve forgotten that it’s also our responsibility to teach them how to recover. It’s our responsibility to help them learn that a bruise isn’t the same thing as a puncture.

We need to do this with emotions as well. Our vigilance to keep feelings from being hurt, to keep anyone from feeling excluded, to prevent disappointment at all costs, robs children of the important skill of learning to deal with these emotional bruises. Teachers who jump in to intervene the moment a child says “I don’t want to sit next to you”, parents who carry six different snacks so they’ll always have exactly what their child wants, are shielding their child from normal risk just as much as if they stopped their child from picking up a stick for fear of splinters. Bruised feelings, just like bruised skin, will happen. Our job as adults is to help children develop the emotional resilience to recover from the bruise and move on, and to teach them to recognize the difference between a bruise and a puncture.