A Day in the Life of a Child-Directed Play-Based Program
Dear Rainforest,
Today was so wonderful we lost track of time. We were late for snack. We forgot to stop to clean up. I thought I’d tell the story of the day just from where I was standing. It’s a pretty big yard, so there was even more happening that I didn’t hear about. At the beginning of the day, we discussed why the bull was troublesome and needed its own pen and shouldn’t be allowed to be roaming around with the cows and charging through arches. They have really, really strong heads and horns. They are so strong they could knock down all the pens and Cottage too with just one horn.
A rubber band rocket traveled nine meters and almost landed on the roof. A meter is less than a kilometer, and a billion kilometers would be really, really far. Later a rocket traveled about 10 feet. When measured by friends’ feet it went 17 feet, but a foot is based on an adult foot which is on average close to 12 inches. We looked at a ruler which is a foot. It makes different numbers if you look at it upside down. Something with four sides that are the same length is a square. Something with two longer sides that are the same length and two shorter sides that are the same length is a rectangle. If you put a rubber band around all the pegs it makes a squarangle. How many triangles could fit inside?
We have a nest of dinosaur eggs in the yard. The mother brought leaves to keep the eggs warm When they rot they generate heat, and later, when the dinosaurs are born, they eat the rotten leaves. Today someone had the idea to paint the dinosaur eggs using the watercolors. One friend painted an egg green, their favorite color. Another painted one orange. Some painted with green, pink and orange. Then they painted the shaving cream and pulled the dropper through it so that it made a pattern of colors, mixing colors together to a coffee shade.
Someone wanted to go on a bug hunt, so we went to turn over logs to see if there were any bugs and to our surprise something slithered quickly under the log again. They thought it was a snake, and I did too at first. Then we spotted legs. We don’t know what it was. It was a little scary the way it moved and really, really interesting. “It’s camouflaged.” It lives at Cottage. That’s its home. Our bug catchers weren’t big enough to hold it. We kept turning over the logs to find it again, and it kept hiding. We are really big, and it is really small. It was probably scared too.
Lots of water got spilled on the dirt path, so friends added sand from the sandbox to make concrete and pave the road. Then they filled big dog jugs, little watering pots and big watering pots and even a wheelbarrow with water and carried them back and forth to make more and more concrete. They had to balance the little watering pot to keep it even and not get wet while carrying it. They worked very hard and for a long time when we all received written invitations to a popsicle party.
It was good we paved the roads, so we could drive to the popsicle party. Each popsicle had a stick, a cup, some cream. Some had sprinkles. I had pomegranate. Later I had pineapple. I heard there was lime and strawberry too. Maybe this is why we forgot snack after all the delicious popsicles. Afterwards, we read a book where every chapter was titled the same thing and everyone knew this and seemed not to be surprised. I was. It was fun to say the title of the book, Robot, Rabbit and Ribbit. A friend pointed out that it had a lot of Rs. Somewhere in between there was a quiet conversation between two friends about what happens after you die.
When I finally came back outside after reading about a Knight and a Dragon, I noticed that someone had created invitations again, this time to a leaf festival. They had collected a very big pile of leaves. This took a long time and even longer because one person thought that leaf festival meant leaf throwing not leaf collecting.
As I was admiring the leaves, a friend slipped a woman figure into my hand and said, “You be her. I’ll be these.” We built and decorated sand castles. Another friend built one, but it kept disintegrating. Finally after pushing down the sand on the inside, it stood! The top crumbled, and it looked even more like a real castle. Another friend built a wall, but apparently there were firecrackers in the wall which made the wall crumble. We needed more water for more construction. This time a castle destroying monster had stomped through the castle.
Love,
Teacher Michelle
Dear grownups:
I wanted to capture our curriculum for the day to demonstrate how no single teacher or curriculum designer or even whole team of educators could possibly design something so rich and in-depth as this child directed, child created, play-based curriculum. Yes we put the rocks in the indentation in the yard and added leaves. Yes we put out the shaving cream and the popsicle sticks but nowhere near each other. Yes we put out the farm animals, rubber band boards, water colors, water, and blocks.
And yes we curated these materials based on observations and listening, but what unfolds, they create and contributes more to their development and learning then anything we could ever plan. There was literacy – reading, writing, speaking and listening – math, geometry, physics, life science, philosophy, art, P.E. and more. There was ethics, problem-solving and empathy and feeling our feelings and negotiation and perspective taking and planning and imagining and creating and more. I am only drawing a tiny portrait of all their work today from my own perspective.
I know I am preaching to the choir, but I’m wanting to enlist your voices in advocating for this kind of teaching and learning as our state adopts universal preschool. Currently, it looks like an expansion of elementary school to include preschool, TK and kindergarten. I would argue that rather then expand elementary schools, we should return TK and kindergarten to child-directed play and to the realm and oversight of early childhood educators and care providers.
Love,
Teacher Michelle