“Watch this,” The child says.
The child waves at their parents. The parents look up and the child shows a jump, or a spin, or a dive, farther or deeper than ever before.
“I can get a five centimo piece from the deep end now,” The child says.
“I bet I can run to the gate and back faster.”
“Kru Tony says I can do a spinning back punch really well now.”
“Watch this.”
Watch them in the park, or the school ground or in their suburban streets, places of play and adventure and practice.. Watch them kicking endlessly, handstanding, chasing one another, hanging from the monkey bars and counting.
“Eleven elephants, twelve elephants.”
“I can do thirty mississippis”
No one can deny that a mississippi has more weight than an elephant, and the other children chant the count together. “Twenty eight mississippi's, twenty nine mississippi's, thirty mississippi's, thirty one mississippi’s” The child drops and pants a lion’s pant and the kids cheer. They run and tag or tig or chase or tick (depending on dialect - all children know the rules of the game from before they even play it, independent of their accent) the new girl, or the boy with the freckles, or that girl who’d broken her arm, needed stitches, hit by a trial bike, but now brave as a beast.
Consider a cat, better a kitten. The kitten chases the wool or its wind up mouse, leaps and catches it, or misses and tries again, then goes off to get itself stuck on the bookshelf, or top of the door, or behind the sofa again.
A working adult cat keeps the theatre or the barn free from vermin, rats and mice and cockroaches. It springs and claws and grabs in teeth, climbing and patrolling the secret places, the places only for the cats and the things that they hunt.
Why then, do we demand that the natural imaginative play of a child, becomes the arse sitting hunch backed porridge of adult life? If we have enough luck, we might move some weights up and down, and if we have more luck than that, perhaps we play football on saturdays, paddel on sundays with the girls or the lads.
Successful teachers know that children can always find a way to play, and that through playing, they learn.
A successful manager might know this too.
Learning happens through three processes:
Isolation - Learning vocabulary
Integration - practicing sentences
Improvisation - having a copnversation
Isolation - Running the field
Integration - Playing chase
Improvisation - Playing basketball
Isolation - Push ups
Integration - Lizard crawl
Improvisation - You get the picture.
Children play as adults should behave. All mammals display their adult behaviour in their infant play, and human children take this further before the sad ending of playtimes. They mark their milestones, play for the joy of playing, repeat for the joy of repeating, and they share and build their own secret children’s tribes and communities.
Let’s play