A Home Educator, particularly one like me who didn’t use curriculums, phonics schemes or fret about key stage development milestones with my pre-school and early years educational provision is often heard using the phrase ‘Learning Through Play’ to justify why colouring, playdoh, lego, jigsaw puzzles, splashing in puddles and finger painting is more than sufficient.
I’m not sure if we borrowed it from the education system or whether they nicked it off us but I hear it all the time in my current (temporary) incarnation as someone who sits in a school four mornings a week.
I know that children do learn through play but I also think they play through learning. Children who are ‘let be’ and left to explore their world with more autonomy and control over which direction things take are fascinating creatures to observe. I mentioned in yesterdays post how much our wee piglets are reminding me of Dragon and Star in the early years. It’s a behaviour that happens naturally in all mammal infants – kittens, puppies, fox cubs and our litter of piglets. Exploring their world, testing, interacting, building the skills they’ll need to survive and navigate their way through their life. [As an aside I have a whole other rant about how we have this dreadful tendancy to step in with our children in a way that animal mothers never do – ‘share’ (why should you, if it’s yours, it’s yours!), ‘say sorry’ (even when you’re not remotely sorry), ‘don’t shout’ (but you want your voice heard and no one is listening so it’s natural to make it louder) but that’s for another time.]
I can’t be the only parent who has watched and listened to my children ‘play out’ their lives. From the very early copying parenting to their toys, to making their characters have the same experiences they have ‘today we’re going to Legoland! For a picnic! To the beach! Today we’re going to the doctors for an injection, to the supermarket to do the food shopping, to the bank to pay money in.’ Even at 10 and 12 Dragon and Star (when not plugged into tablets or games consoles, or listening to music and watching youtube clips – they are pre-teens just like many others) spend hours each day playing. A current passion is Minecraft – something I happily confess makes me feel old because I don’t really get it and find myself saying things like ‘isn’t that clever, you couldn’t do things like that in my day!’. Lots of their time is spent on Minecraft building houses and then showing us their designs and features. They also keep animals, breed them and scoff at how limited the scope for a pig on Minecraft is when they are so aware of the full possibilities. They used to play games where characters lived in a campervan and traveled around. I also recall how books I’d read them or films they’d watched would have a similar impact on their games. See ‘play through learning’ along with learning through play. They have never yet played ‘schools’….
So back to my title – I’m not really suggesting everyone else is odd, although sometimes I am heard to mutter that when I hear the traffic report on the radio or scary news coverage or think of people working in jobs they hate so they can buy a bigger plasma TV or nicer car. I’m just reassuring myself that despite different stimulus and inspiration the same process is being ‘played out’ with Dragon and Star as with kids everywhere. They take their lives and experiences and rationalise them, get them straight in their heads and manipulate them into ways that make sense to them and enable them to extract the most from them. Last week Dragon and I spent a couple of hours making charts and graphs because he’d not previously understood how to create them or what they meant. We used hours of sunshine per day as our data. He is learning about supply and demand, market research and various other business skills with his postcard sales and both have been party to current discussions about getting another sow to increase our piglet yield now we know we have a market. Star has been busily planting and tending seeds with me and we’ve had long conversations about the ethics of meat eating. Basic skills, learning what they need to get through their lives. They know about gathering firewood, food and water, growing crops, rearing livestock and are learning along with us about building shelter. They are finding ways to use their skills and their time to earn money for the things they cannot provide themselves and they are getting daily examples of working with others, being a neighbour, helping where you can as is the nature of life on Rum.
Those piglets are getting perfectly equipped for their lives, learning all they’ll need to know. They would struggle if suddenly they were expected to dwell in trees or live aboard a sailing boat. I asked Star yesterday who’s life she looks at and thinks she might like to one day have and her answer was back like a shot ‘well our’s of course!’. On that basis I think their current training is pretty much perfect.