WF, 5/19/2021 | Wee Friends Early Childhood Program LLC

Happy Wednesday!

I’m going to be honest. This article is on the longer side but it is a GOOD one. People often underestimate the playful nature that children have. We spend a great deal of time in free play, offering several activities and areas for children to dive into. It’s here that children get to experiment socially, learn how to deal with conflict, and figure out HOW to play with peers.

For example, a group of peers spent the entire time in our outdoor housekeeping area this morning. They used things from throughout the yard in their play—mulch, grass, weeds, helicopter seeds, etc. For almost two hours, they kept extending their play, staying interested and self driven by coming up with new tasks to do.

In this blog post below, Teacher Tom goes into great detail about a child who was in his class:

“When I asked this father why they had left the girl’s mother and older siblings to come so far just for four two-and-a-half hour sessions a week, he told me he was worried about Anjoli. “She doesn’t know how to play.” All of his children had attended school from the earliest age possible, schools that promised academic achievement, but he had recently seen the error of his ways. He told me that he felt it was too late for his sons, but he hoped that it wasn’t for Anjoli.”

“It all seemed both heartbreaking and bizarre to me, but the father was sincere. I’d never met a child who didn’t know how to play. Maybe, I thought, this father simply didn’t know what play looked like. Indeed, I started our first day together on the playground with the theory that it was the father, not the girl, who didn’t know about play.”

Teacher Tom does a fantastic job at sharing this story—I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

http://teachertomsblog.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-girl-who-didnt-know-how-to-play.html