Can I Go and Play Now?. Greg Bottrill
into the universe that you have created for and with them. And yes, tracking progress is a useful element of ensuring that your children are being challenged and are thriving, but often this is an expectation based on the desire for data outcomes rather than the well-being of children. Get well-being right and data will follow, so give yourself time to make this happen and wherever possible resist the thumbscrew of scrutiny that dogs our KS1/2 colleagues.
Part 2 Getting Continuous Provision Right
Introduction
Continuous Provision and getting it right is the most integral part of your day. Get it wrong and children cannot progress but rather stagnate in an environment that offers little challenge or opportunity. Get it right and you give your children the very best start and an atmosphere in which they can thrive. Continuous Provision must be skills based, open ended, collaborative and neutral. It must engage, provoke and facilitate learning.
So how do we get it right?
First, we need to give ourselves a break – an actual break. We have to step back and remove ourselves from the cycle of coming in to school first thing and setting up the Continuous Provision. More often than not, we arrive and busy ourselves in trying to make each area of provision purposeful and attractive, which is all commendable but what we’re actually doing here is putting a cap on learning. We are limiting children to our choices. We are not enabling – we are unconsciously telling children what they can experience and explore.
If I like playing in the water and want to explore its journey down ramps or through pipes but the adult has meticulously set up the zone with dinosaurs and a selection of rocks and pebbles with a plastic island in the middle all bedecked with foam numbers, can I as a child explore that zone as I wish? Is the adult not interpreting the space even before I have arrived with my childish imagination and dreams? We need to step away from the Continuous Provision and allow children the freedom to interpret. So, first things first, when you come in to school or your setting stop yourself from ‘setting up’. Rather spend the time carrying out a Continuous Provision audit. Interrogate your Continuous Provision. Ask yourself the following questions:
Does it promote the skills that I know my children need to develop?
Does it tie in with interests that I have seen or heard my children talk about?
Is it appealing to both boys and girls?
To do this, you need to invest your time not in planning sheets or carefully setting up tables, but rather in shelving units.
Each area of Continuous Provision is most effective when it is open ended
To achieve this, you need to display a range of resources that children can freely access (and return) so that rather than setting up, you are setting out.
Use whatever containers you feel are appropriate: if you are a homely person consider wicker baskets; if you are an Ikea goddess, then what better excuse for a trip than the acquisition of new plastic boxes or baskets? Neutral colours are, of course, best because you remove the danger of appealing only to one gender (although most boys deep down seem to love pink). Ultimately, you are looking for ways to effectively display a wide range of resources that the children can access and then introduce by themselves in to the provision. If you have a group of children who love dinosaurs, then consider a basket of these alongside a stack of wooden blocks, both of which are displayed on the shelving unit in the provision area. The children will select the dinosaurs and perhaps build a den or volcano from the blocks, but if these resources are in the Play-Doh, they will just as likely explore the dough with the dinosaurs, use it as cement for the blocks, or indeed interpret it in multiple ways. Suddenly, you are encouraging children to apply their imagination into their world. Your neatly set-up dino world on the Play-Doh table will only appeal to the dinosaur lovers, pretty much instantly closing it down to any child who might just want to explore the Play-Doh itself or get creative with Play-Doh cakes.
Chapter 3 What Play is and What Play Isn’t
‘Play for today ...’ – The Cure
Play is one of the most misunderstood concepts. In today’s educational world it is also one of the most underrated. And yet it is the most vital component for development – the gift of play is the greatest thing we can ever possibly give a child. Unfortunately, the incessant clamour for measurability and adult world-dominated thinking overshadows the truly rich potential of play and replaces it instead with a stale and stagnant regimen of worksheets, structure and the treadmill of ‘factory-setting’ tick-box activities.
I make no apologies for saying this. We seem to offer our young children an educational experience that has emerged from the Upside Down. If you’ve never watched the Netflix series, Stranger Things, then go do it. The Upside Down is like a shadow world that echoes our own but is lifeless and haunted by the unknown. There are various portals to this other world through which they can entwine. In our educational version we somehow need to close the portal.
The Upside Down emanates from Key Stages 1 and 2, and from the traditionalist typeset idea of what education actually is and how it should be delivered. We have already explored how children’s languages need to be heard and there is no better vehicle for this than play. Real Play should be from the child and for the child. It should be open ended, give opportunities for self-chosen challenges, offer limitless possibilities and endless interpretations. Real play enables children – it lights them up.
We can only offer this kind of play, however, if we are willing to breathe a different ether. I like to see children as people who breathe a different air from us that makes them behave, feel, think and dream in a totally different way from the adults around them. The ether that they breathe in is at a lower height than ours. As adults, we need to breathe this ether too. In order to do this, we need to literally get on our knees and not pray, but play.
Real play is owned by the child
It is not necessarily planned. It has a more reactive element that has wildness and spontaneity at heart. It can’t be confined. It shouldn’t have restraints. It is choice, it is vitality. Real Play is not created by the Red Group, Blue Group or Green Group. It isn’t enabled by round robin activities or by a factory-style rotation of children with a TA taking it in turns to add coloured tissue paper to an adult-drawn design. Play is creativity, it is abandon. It is risk, collaboration, interpretation and reinterpretation. Its meaning is infinite and its importance cannot and must not be ignored. If your children are not engaged in Real Play, then they are not truly learning – they are merely copying and being shaped into mini Stepford Wives-type beings who lose their own identity and self-purpose.
Ask yourself – what should children be doing?
If I truly want to answer this question, do I not need to detach myself from the demands of a curriculum or state-driven expectations? Very few of us would deny that children need to play, so if that is the case, why is play being squeezed from our children’s lives and from their school day? Why are we enforcing a way of being that is the antithesis of what they actually need? We need to ask ourselves what kind of children we want to nurture. Our society of tomorrow will be shaped by the 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds of today. What natures do we want these children to have? Do we not want creative, caring citizens who have dreams and ambitions, who have a spark within them, who are able to collaborate and make decisions for themselves? These ‘soft skills’ will define our culture through the years – respect, thoughtfulness, kindness, application, self-drive, creativity. Play and playfulness enable these in bucketloads. Yet we seem determined to crush this, to belittle it somehow. Our adult world has demands that we think play cannot meet. It’s as though the only way for children to succeed is for them to put out their own spark and adopt our adult version of what a child should do and be.
As an Early Years teacher you must see this. You must. Surely it is impossible to work with young children and deny that play is integral to their development. And yet