“Nice and cute”

Right now, we’re really worried about pictures of children.  We’re worried about who’s taking them, where and why.  With digital technology, we worry that these images could wander from cell phone to computer to internet and back again.  We’re worried about keeping control, which is problematic because in anything to do with children (and possibly life in general) control is a demanding and limiting ambition.

One area of contention is over what we might call the right to photograph children in public space – even if the child is one’s own.  In this the photograph and the photographer are seen as dangerous, and fears about their intent limit children’s behaviours when in public, as parents ensure that they are covered up at all times and that strangers are kept at a distance.

Another battle is over what might be called the right to the appearance of the child, how they look, what they’re wearing and what all of these might suggest about the parents.  In spite of all the belts being tightened, there is a massive industry set up around making even the smallest of children look ‘cool’.  You might not be buying Stella McCartney clothes for yourself, but thanks to her partnership with the Gap you can buy them for your toddler.  I can’t tell you how many parents, and thus children, I’ve met on playgrounds who are terrified of clothes getting dirty, even though those clothes will be too small in a couple of months.

A friend just sent me this link, which demonstrates a particularly Brooklyn way of addressing the problem.  It shows how much cooler you can look with money to spend.  I do think that this service, which takes school photos of children with costumes and no formal posing, is a far more entertaining version of the stiff and vacant-eyed process I remember.  But at the same time, the fact that it exists shows how invested parents are in images of their children – even the same parents who may look at their own school photographs and laugh at those hideous haircuts.

A similar impulse can be seen in this row, in which a (different) photography company photoshopped the scar off of a three year-old girl without asking her parents first.  They replied:  “There are a lot of parents who are happy when marks which may have shown up from a scratch that morning are made to disappear, and the same goes for runny noses… We just want things to be nice and cute.”

This desire to show children as cool, or as physically ‘perfect’ is incredibly dangerous, because it perpetuates the idea that a child’s attractiveness is their most important attribute.  I used to think that skinned knees at the end of the day proved I’d been having fun, and that hot pink and bright red went together better than any other two colours in the world. 

When I see portraits that children have taken of one another they are almost always pulling faces, flipping off the camera and grinning.  Candid shots show them doing inexplicable things with paper or mud, digging holes and setting off on expeditions that are mostly conducted in their heads.  They show children with dirty faces, chewing sandwiches with their mouths wide open or demonstrating how they can roll their eyes into the back of their heads.  Compared to the posed, airbrushed images which are produced through official channels they are indeed ‘candid’ - characterized by openness and honesty of expression.  They contain a truth about individual children and childhood in general, it’s messiness and its glory.

Update: There’s an exhibition of photographs taken by children at the Kingsmead School in Hackney, on right now at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood.  The slideshow of images children have taken about their lives, is well worth a look, and below is a self-portrait taken by Sally Hammond.

“The Search for Unexpected Harmonies”

Yesterday, at the age of 100, Claude Levi-Strauss died.

He has been called the ‘father of modern anthropology’ and, in a way, I think that’s absolutely fitting.  He was undoubtedly a giant in a field that he helped to create, and his ideas about how to conduct anthropological research and examine findings remains central to the discipline, as well as the academic value he placed upon myth in human understanding.  He was one of the first academics to suggest that Westerners and so-called ‘primitives’ shared fundamental commonalities, that our human similarities remain the basis of our cultural differences.  His work, particularly the landmark texts The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked are must-reads for any anthropology student and inspired Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Barthes among many others.  A fairly thorough obituary can be found here.

However, I have to admit that as much as I respected his work, much of it never spoke to me.  What follows is obviously a simplification of his theories as I understood them, and regardless or perhaps because of my reservations I recommend you read his work yourself.  That caveat in place, his primary point and the basis of the Structuralism that followed him was that all cultural work can be divided along binary lines of contradiction.  Life/Death, Right/Wrong, Male/Female and so on, creating possibilities and tensions that define our lives.  He believed that this was innate, essential and inevitable – and that this process of human understanding of the world was what we all shared.

That’s where I fundamentally disagree.  I don’t think that this binary approach to the world, which seeks out twins in order to separate them, is universal.  I think it is specific and potentially very damaging because it privileges certain kinds of cross-pair associations which them lump together sets of ideas which do not, in and of themselves, belong together.  If we look at the list above, a family of Life, Right and Male becomes formed and defined by its opposite of Death, Wrong and Female.  This kind of binary opposition is a particularly modern, Western way of understanding the world – as is the urge to explain those understandings as natural, inevitable and empirically true.  Of course, he also argued that kinship systems had developed as a method of ‘gift exchange’ of women between tribes, so it is perhaps inevitable that we would disagree.

Ultimately, I think that human experience is richer than binary systems allow, more nuanced and more alive to the complexities of human emotions, senses and relationships.  I think that the human mind is capable of processing multiple, diverse and seemingly contradictory experiences at once, and that the worlds imprints itself upon us in overlapping layers.  More than one thing can be true at any given time.

Of course, I came to these theories by passing through the Foucaultian Post-Structuralist woodlands of Vassar, where Butler and Barthes were rarely read, perhaps, but very often quoted.  Academia would have been infinitely poorer without his work, and I think that this is the dilemma that all academics face.  Not to sound overly Oedipal (as he would argue it), but we need to challenge our fathers.

I like to think Levi-Strauss appreciated critique – even if he did vote against including women in the Académie Française!

More links:

BBC CNN Wikipedia

 

Parents and Provision

Watford Council and local parents have got into a flap.  Much as I hate to link to the Daily Mail, here is a recent article discussing a ban two Adventure Playgrounds in Watford have placed on parents on site, claiming the presence of adults without CRB (Criminal Record Bureau) checks is simply too dangerous and contravenes Government regulations.  To balance that, here another link from the Guardian making the point that no such regulations prevent parents from watching their children in a public park.

There are a couple of problems with this.  The first is that Adventure Playgrounds operate as open access play provision and as such might be considered public parks – except that the ‘public’ they cater to is exclusively under-15 (except when Youth Club is on).  Adventure Playgrounds are not ‘family’ provision, but places where children can be away from their families entirely.  Both of these articles are written by adults outside of the play profession (as evidenced by the determined placing of quotation marks around the phrase “Play Ranger”, as if this was only allegedly their job title) and are entirely caught up in the rights of the parents to do as they please, when keeping their children safe.  To me, this argument is closest to one advocating allowing parents to follow their children to school and sit at the back of the class.  This point is made here, as Watford Council compares Adventure Playgrounds to nurseries and playgroups – other places parents are accustomed to leaving their children.

It’s so easy for children’s places for play to be dominated by adult concerns, for their parents to use Adventure Playgrounds as places to socialize or volunteer, and for site workers to respond by altering provision to suit the preferences expressed by parents rather than children.  The sites I have seen which welcome parents on site tend, though not exclusively, to be more ‘polite’, less messy, less risky or exciting and ultimately less playful places than those where children can test the boundaries of workers and their environment without fear of getting an earful from their Mums.  It’s so rare for children to find places to be away from their parents, to meet social and physical challenges out of their sight.  Do you remember the difference in how you felt and behaved when your parents were watching?  Or the humiliation of getting told off or cleaned up in front of your friends?

There are also very real concerns for workers when parents are on site, as they may have different ideas about appropriate risk, dirt and so on and will often curtail the activities of their child and others.  The parents who want to follow their children everywhere are generally ones unused to being told ‘no’ and, almost by definition, are more likely to dominate their child’s play.  Sometimes parents will shout or swear at their children, or publicly demean or shame them.  Once they are used to being there, it is extremely difficult to get such parents to leave, even though their children are the ones who need a place to be away from them so desperately.  Kind or not, domineering or just overprotective, parents can dramatically alter the culture of the site and limit opportunities for all the children there, not just their own.

That said, I think it’s a terrible idea to ban parents from Adventure Playgrounds on the basis of CRB checks.  It only increases their terrible fear of the unknown, and does nothing to address it in a productive way.  For parents who find Adventure Playgrounds too ’scary’ to let their children attend on their own, this ban will mean they don’t let the children attend at all, and some parents questioned are already speaking of a boycott.  In this boycott, it is only the children who will suffer.

There is an alternative.  Parents need to understand what an Adventure Playground is, what the core beliefs and ethics are.  They need to see how children who attend are able to develop skills of independence, of problem-solving, how they thrive when NOT given constant one-to-one attention but instead are trusted to make their own way and to ask for help when they need it.  This process takes time, and may require a (limited) number of visits while parents and children adjust.  Both groups need to be supported in this by site staff, not banned on the basis of paperwork.

Adventure Playground workers need to understand that parents are not the enemy, and should not be removed from the site by any means necessary because, while a site without parents is generally more playful and more adventurous, banning parents means that large numbers of children will be excluded.  Number 4 of the Playwork Principles reminds us to advocate for play “when engaging with adult-led agendas”, and playground workers need to remember and explain that their first priority is children’s play.  What’s more, when site workers know more about the family situations their children go home to they are better placed to support the children should things get difficult – much more effective in safeguarding the children’s welfare than any number of CRB checks.

“Miss! Miss! MISS!”

I just delivered my first play session in a school.  People in play often choose not to work with schools, preferring the home territory of Adventure Playgrounds, or to conduct Play Ranging sessions on local housing estates or in public parks.  The thing is, there are lots of children in supplementary classes or formal after-school clubs, or who go straight home after school ends and unless we work in schools we will never meet these children, know them or their needs. 

The relationships children have with adults in schools is fundamentally different to those on playgrounds, and are based on assumptions of respect, obedience and reward or punishment that good playworkers work over time to dissolve.  I’m not saying that these structures are inappropriate for schools (that’s another subject entirely), just that they are very difficult to balance with the basic tenents of good playwork practice.  It’s possible that any playwork in schools is conducted as a sort of compromise, and any conversation about play that teachers or playground staff and playworkers might have is fraught with misunderstandings.

“They just don’t play anymore,” the teachers told us beforehand.  “There’s so many fights instead.  When I was young we played loads of games, but the kids today just don’t know how.”

This made a sort of sense to us.  We’ve seen children with little opportunity to play have trouble initiating or maintaining play with others, and the first consequence of this is generally either aggression or withdrawal.  But when we went for our first lunchtime session we saw children teasing their friends, making faces, getting out a jump rope and throwing balls one to another and trying to cram as much unstructured activity as they could into one short hour.

“See?”  The playground manager said.  “Just what I said, no games.  Now, I was thinking you could start up a netball match.  That would be excellent.”

No!  That is not excellent.  This is not play – that is Physical Education, and as such is catered for during lesson time.

Play is something different, but explaining those differences and child-led playwork has been proving somewhat difficult.  It made me think about how many ethnographies of childhood have focused on games to the exclusion of all else.  Some of these have been very good, and landmark texts in demonstrating the rich existence of a children’s culture, but they have sometimes failed to note that games are a part of play, not the sum total.  In fact, games which are led by an adult fixated on rules need not be playful at all.

That said, it is often said that previous generations of children had enormous stores of skipping rhymes and ball games to play, and that children today don’t seem to.  I wouldn’t argue with that – the children I know often don’t know or play many games that adults would recognise as such.  The reasons for this are often given: that children don’t have enough free time, that they don’t spend the free time they have with other children (particularly of different ages), and that because of these children’s cultural networks are collapsing.  This is certainly true.  Additionally, children are given a number of toys which demand to be played with in certain ways, they have (arguably) shorter attention spans than previous generations and some say they lack iniative.

It becomes clear that the lack of games played by children is associated with a value judgement on not just the conditions in which they are raised, but also on themselves.  I would agree that it’s not surprising that children growing up in a city covered in ‘No Ball Games’ signs don’t know many ball games, but to deduce also that they are incapable of playing games is something else entirely.  Children are incredibly inventive, and adaptive.  If they are not playing many games, traditional or invented in that moment, we have to think whether one reason might be that games do not serve their play needs in the ways they served those of previous generations.

Our children spend so much time in structured environments – both for education and entertainment.  Their time and habits are strictly monitored.  What if, by choosing play that does not carry a list of rules, rewards and punishments, they are catering to a side of their development that needs spontaneity, improvisation, and personal meaning? 

Why is it so difficult to trust that children who spend their lunchtime ‘messing around’ and being as silly as possible, are doing so because it’s the best complement to the rest of their day?  While I would love to see school playgrounds that offer a richer environment than the tarmac postage stamps we accept as ‘normal’, our first need is to develop a body of practice which both accepts the limitations of working within a traditional school environment but seeks to facilitate children’s exploration of their own play needs.

This is, obviously, something of a work in progress!

Souvenirs of Play and Travel

I have felt a little thrown lately, having gone a few weeks without doing much playwork, and am slowly pulling together the bits of paper with notes I’ve furiously scribbled to myself.

The Beauty of Play Conference (already a month ago!) was spectacular, a remarkable opportunity to remember and experience play.  Adults and children play very differently and for different reasons, but there was something so potent in the open offers of the site that those differences seemed thin.  We put on face paint and charged around hollering, we made music by banging sticks on trees and watched our marshmallows carefully for signs of burning, we played games of war, mystery and blindfolded exploration.  Our ordinary hesitancies melted away in the face of such brilliant opportunities to have fun and then talk about with some of the smartest people around.

It’s a radical idea for most theorists, this level of personal involvement.  It made me realize how strange our common assumptions about conferences are – why should a conference dedicated to understanding play take its arrangements from school?  Closed rooms and rigid timetables are standard at most conferences, as are PowerPoint presentations and that horrible moment of standing with your lunch tray and wondering where to sit.  Why is any of this necessary? 

I wonder whether play, as a rather niche discipline, has sometimes made efforts to prove its legitimacy that risk compromising the very values which set the field apart.  Independence.  Direct engagement.  The marshalling all the senses for an adventure of discovery.

Having recently spent more time than usual at the office making phone calls, drawing up new training materials and planning for events, I’m realizing how vital doing the playwork really is if you’re going to be any good at talking about it.  Already I can feel myself go rusty at the edges, and those notes I made at previous sessions have lost much of their immediacy.

I still have them though, and the distance can serve a useful purpose.  My folders of photographs and audio recordings of play are just waiting for me to go through them.  Looking at the evidence of play requires a little quiet, some time to think, and the great impossible task of imagining oneself into the mind of another.

Below are some more images from the Gambia trip.  Travelling, like play, takes you out of your ordinary routines and expectations.  It offers you the chance to feel awakened, altered – to experience everything more acutely.  Just like play, the brilliance of travel can quickly fade once you’re back at home.

As these images were taken by the children themselves, they can be seen as evidence of play, as they fiddled with my camera, experimenting with image-making and laughing uproariously at the results.

Unnecessary Equipment

It seems like I’ve been arguing a lot recently to have less equipment on Adventure Playgrounds, and for a return to loose parts on site so that children can construct their own structures through and for their play as necessary.  Still, habits die hard, and when I was in the Gambia with a collection of other playworkers we quickly began assembling bits of equipment that were familiar to us.  This was partly to help us introduce ourselves to the children and partly to help us feel useful in a new and unfamiliar place.

We started by using the pieces of broken furniture which had been pulled out of the schoolhouse,

and with a hand from the children…

we soon built something that interested them briefly.

Much better was the string we found, which they used for skipping ropes and a swing.

This was hung from the tree which the children climbed for mangoes throughout the day, sometimes throwing them down to (or at) the other children who were swinging.  It all proved how rich a playspace can be with just a tree and some string, and how playworkers can always be taught a thing or two about play, playspaces and the capacities of children.

Mirror leaves and mirror campfire

It is difficult sometimes to imagine a genuinely play-friendly world, where children could run and explore as they chose, where thoughtfully placed elements would inspire everyone – regardless of age – to pause and imagine.  It is easy to forget how even small environmental changes can amaze a child and enable rich and profound play.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of a place near my home, a long thin patch of scrub grass and brambles that ran alongside the pavement.  I’d been there before, no doubt passing it with my Mum on the way to something else, but one day something unprecedented had happened.  A door had appeared.

It was a perfect door, brightly painted with a shiny round knob that turned in both directions.  It swung upen and clunked shut, fitting exactly within its frame, but that frame stood free and alone as if it had grown complete out of the earth.  Nothing around it and nothing on either side, this door fascinated me.  Opening and closing it before – with no small trepidation, because what was this if not strange magic? – walking through it, I played with the door in a very serious way.  Play can be solemn; we forget this too.

I don’t remember how long I played there, whether it was one afternoon that stands sunny and years-long in my recollection or on many occasions over a period of months, but that door came back to me when I finally visited one of the Liminal play spaces designed by Penny Wilson and scattered through Mile End Park.  It is one of three, each unique, and more information on them and on Penny’s definitions of liminality in play can be found here.

It is ambiguously signposted, and best found by accident.  The most visible part is the swinging gate which moves in a slow arc and is strong enough to carry even very large ‘children’.

It’s difficult to appreciate how strange this place feels without having seen the local context – it is to one side of a large and vividly sponsored outdoor gym equipment complex, and between a busy road and a canal.  Yet it manages to feel like another world entirely, a much older world which invites lingering, experimentation and conversation.  It somehow telescopes time and perspective, and beautifully illustrates Penny’s idea of “the space as a player, (luring) the child into play with a series of artifacts which act as play cues.  These artifacts will contain references to entering and leaving the spaces, or will mirror an overlooked or unexpected aspect of the spaces, literally in some instances”.

There is a ‘campfire’ area, half-screened by the thick trees which form a complete canopy overhead.  Instead of a fire is a round mirror, showing the trees above and the elongated curious faces of visitors all stretching towards the centre.

This mirror seems in oblique conversation with others, some round, some scalloped, which hang from the high branches above the swinging gate.  These twist and flash in the breeze, further prompts to curiousity and imagination demonstrating how paltry the commonly held ideas about play really are.

Much of the work behind these places rests on Penny’s understanding of how children play, of their common preferences for peripheral or threshold places which offer games of transition and imagination.  These places give children the chance to experiment with the idea of travelling, through time and places real and fictive, through the world and through one’s own self.  Journeys and discovery of hidden places, transformation of the self – all of this quickly comes to sound rather mythic.  That is rather the point.

By missing these elements out of how we define, discuss and provide for children’s play we are crucially underestimating them and the play they are engaged in.  Too often play is seen only as a physical activity, and equipment for play looks like that for the gym.  However, play has profound emotional, social, even spiritual depths.  It is no more and no less than the exploration of the world, the creation of oneself, and the scripting of life and imagination.

Summer Holidays

The summer months are the busiest for playworkers, when we run more sessions per week, for longer each time.  Playgrounds are at their most boisterous, flooded with more children than ever as parents look to fill those long bright days, and outdoor sessions attract children who are roaming around their neighbourhoods looking for adventure.

I went on a brief holiday of my own to Dorset, where I ate ice cream, combed the beach for interesting rocks that turned grey in my pockets, and stared at the window of a toy shop.

This last one felt like getting woken up by a splash of cold water, reminding me that rampant consumerist gendering of play never goes on vacation.

One window, a riotous pink explosion of Sylvanian families, tiny pushchairs, baby dolls and makeover kits.

And the other?  Toxic mutants!  Mega Death Match games!  Giant blinking skulls, pyramids, skateboards, tanks.  Things that are blue!

I think that most children enjoy, as I did, a variety of toys.  There are things in both of these windows that would have made me extremely happy for as long as it took to break them into a thousand sharp plastic pieces.  The problem that I have isn’t with the toys (though many of them do cost an absurd amount and were probably made by, as well as for, children) or even the colour blue or pink.  It’s with the strict categorization of everything in the world into either appropriate for girls or appropriate for boys, and the implication that interest in some things precludes interest others.

Girls have: homes, babies, ways to experiment with their appearance.

Boys have: war, travel, construction and demolition.

This zoning continues into the store itself, which like so many stores is effectively zoned into ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, and the distinctions made clear by the packaging of the toys.  It makes a child’s experience of browsing for a toy into a statement about their gender, and ultimately limits their fields of experience. 

It seems self-defeating to me – wouldn’t ditching the gender imperative mean that all children would have the chance to be interested in all the toys?

Later at the beach there was a  similarly product-focused version of ‘what children need’ was on offer.  Where the river ran into the Channel a deep basin was formed, offering rafting, dune-surfing and the chance to clamber over rocks and tide pools.  Possibly one of the finest natural play opportunities anywhere, with free and open raw materials for building and demolishing and the sounds and smells of the water everywhere. 

And to one side?

The inevitable bouncy castles.

I’m not a dour and humourless playworker really, and I try not to spend my time picking holes in other people’s provision or pointing fingers and saying “Consumerist!  Patronizing!  Exclusionary!” in a loud voice of alarm.  It’s just that these things seem so indicative of much wider problems that we, as adults, have with children, play and ourselves.  Adult anxiety manifests itself in the careful structuring of children’s time and policing of their behaviours, and so many people who say they want the best for children simply don’t think to ask them, or wait and see what they choose freely.

Even on holiday.

Play Day 2009

To compensate for the wall of text that was my previous post, here are some images of Wednesday’s Play Day!  We held it in Highbury Fields and children came from across the borough to celebrate and to enjoy the various offers such as den-building, a natural play area, face-painting and an old-fashioned sports day.  It was a great way for children and playworkers different neighborhoods and Adventure Playgrounds to get to know one another, and an excellent example of a play-based festival.

“So okay, what do I really know about play?”

Playworkers, whether on a dedicated site or working in public space, tend to bring a selection of materials that children can use to create their own play activities.  Common materials might be paint, tubs of glitter, pavement chalks, a rope for tug of war or a swing, and perhaps some dressing up clothes.  We generally try to bring as little as possible when we go out on session, for a number of different reasons.

We don’t want to perpetuate the widely-held notion that everyday play requires stuff, or that it requires any stuff other than that which surrounds you anyway.  Play is best when it is most basic – climbing trees, digging in the earth, building and using your imagination.

We also don’t want to create a dynamic where the playworkers are seen as bringing all of this stuff to the children as a form of entertainment.  We want to facilitate, not provide.  The whole point of playworkers going out into public space is to help children gain confidence in using the places in which they live, encouraging them to view pebbles, grass and leaves as perfectly adequate toys.

However, we know the amazing potential of good quality loose parts to expand a child’s understanding of play and of themselves.  The difference that dressing up clothes can make is spectacular, and bright chalks and glitter transform the whole area into a dazzling kaleidescope of play.  Loose parts can also compensate for an area that is lacking in them – it’s nearly impossible to build dens in most public parks where brush is tidied away and disposed of and children today rarely have the chance to get messy.

At the same time though, we have become quite dependent on the materials we bring - on the ‘arts and crafts’ options and the sports equipment - to get play started.  Kit bags get bigger and bigger as children ask for new things, for different things, and we want to provide them.  That’s why when one of my colleagues told me about a session she recently ran with no stuff at all, I was enthralled.  It seems ridiculous, but I had never heard of such a thing.  Below are all quotes from Kitty Suchard, who works at the Play Association of Tower Hamlets.

“We had been bringing loads,” she said, “especially crafts because we were trying to attract new children.  We wanted to see how it would be if we brought nothing at all.  It was a slow start and some came and then went.  Play took longer to initiate and involved us all asking a lot of questions.  We hung out at first, then they would suggest a game.

We played hide and seek, we played with cracks in the pavement.  After a while it was almost as if (the playworkers) weren’t there, and they were much more focused on their relationships with each other.  They were gossiping amongst themselves, and the older children led games.   Not us.”

As we talked I could feel myself getting a little uncomfortable at the thought of bringing absolutely nothing.  It seemed like going to a party without a gift.  She agreed, saying that it felt new and strange, and we wondered how playworkers had got to that point – so dependent on the trappings of play, even as we tried to convince children they weren’t necessary.

“You feel quite out in the open without the backup of stuff,” she said.  “We had to step back as playworkers and say ’so okay, what do I really know about play?’  It was much more physical; we were involved.  We were running and playing ourselves, not just handing things out or helping when they asked.

“(Before) they were always asking for direction with the stuff, like we had become just another object.  But that day was amazing, we made daisy chains, they brought some of their own favorite toys out from their houses and shared them with us.  And it spread out over the whole estate, rather than just being centred around a bag of kit.”

After this conversation I ran my own stuff-free sessions on three different sites and I have to agree with everything Kitty shared.  Materials had previously been a source of contention at times, with games of theft of materials starting to impact upon other forms of play and everything liquid being emptied over us.  We had solved this first by changing the materials from paint to cotton wool balls, for example, and bringing nothing we were afraid to lose.  These last sessions, however, had none of these issues.

We played hide and seek and the children shared their favorite hiding places.  We jumped over scars in the tarmac and collected pebbles to pitch at the drain.  We dredged up games from the dim recollections of our own childhoods as they explained the rules of their games to us, and we sat for ages deciding what to play and how.  In the process we came to know the children in different ways than previously.  Perhaps most importantly, we were fully and implicated in the play both socially and physically, running and jumping until we nearly passed out.  And when we left, there was no period of cleaning up the detritus of play that had always bothered me, with its suggestion that play there was ‘over’ for the day.  Instead we just nodded to one another that it was time and left the site saying that we were going home for dinner.  Behind us, the children stayed out to finish the games they had started.

During our reflection on these sessions, we decided as a team that we might slowly reintroduce a few carefully considered materials individually – such as a mask one week, or a box.  The difference that a particular object can make for a child with poor play skills is too important to neglect, but it will be done differently than before, and far more deliberately.  It will be done with close attention paid to the needs and interests of the children as we come to know them better – and for that reason, it won’t be for a while yet.