The Allure of Playing Cards

Some of my warmest childhood memories are of playing cards with friends and family; evenings devoted to lengthy game sessions or wet camping holidays rescued by the familiar yet slightly mysterious faces of the fifty-two cardboard rectangles. The longstanding favourite game in our family is Racing Demon, a high-speed, adrenalin-inducing strategy game which gets all the  more demonic the more players that join in. Strangely, I've never met anyone outside of our family who knows this fantastic game, but maybe others call by a different name.

The Mud Racetrack - A Loose Parts Playground Story

The universal appeal of mud was demonstrated within the first few hours of setting up our loose parts playground and opening up the garden space; children got stuck in straightaway, making trenches, digging holes, bashing in posts and, once our mud kitchen was established, making all manner of muddy culinary delights. And the enthusiasm certainly hasn’t waned. Every lunch and break time the ‘loose parts garden’, as it is now termed, buzzes with activity as children across the grade levels happily play together. One of the observable wonders is how their play evolves over time and projects take new shapes and directions.

One such project is 'The Mud Racetrack' which has developed from a digging a simple hole to carving out ‘irrigation’ trenches to creating a complex raised racetrack for remote control cars. There are so many aspects to this project which are fantastic - the teamwork of the large group involved, the ingenuity and authentic problem-solving and the perseverance. But is the raw enthusiasm and joy which makes me so incredibly happy, as this was exactly the kind of project I’d hoped to see come about when initiating the loose parts playground.

Using Ed Tech

One of my goals this year was to provide my students with more opportunities for effective technology use. I have found that referral to the SAMR model and the International Baccalaureate’s Approaches to Learning skills (ATLs) have helped to support my planning and to hone in on transferable skills.

Building a Learning Community: Involving Parents

With the heightened emphasis on the learning community in the International Baccalaureate's Enhanced PYP, we have been aiming to reach out to parents in various different ways at the Aga Khan Academy Hyderabad, India. Adding to other long-standing engagements such as parent involvement in school events, participation as guest speakers and taking feedback through surveys and questionnaires, we have explored bringing parents on-board in some new ways of late. These include learning alongside their children, sharing their perspectives on our curriculum and contributing to our resource bank through item donation.

Snapshots of Play

Photo Credit: Mita Mohanty

In August of this year we launched our play initiative in the Junior School, building upon some earlier moves in this direction the previous academic year. Three months in, we can see some tangible successes. Dedicating the last lesson of the day to play - a time for curriculum outcomes to be explored explicitly through playful approaches - and also re-envisioning our lunchtime play has really made a difference.

Supporting Learners in Becoming Independent

Observing my own teaching approach develop over the years, I have seen myself move from fast-paced, highly structured lessons, packed with varied teacher-led learning engagements to slower, freer lessons in which students explore ideas at their individual pace, continually reflect on their learning and find which approaches to learning best suit themselves. I’m still on a journey with this but I think I’m gaining a much better understanding of how better to support my students to be successful, independent, learners.

Nature Tables

Bringing nature into our home is something which my son and I have always enjoyed and we take great pleasure in showing off our finds on a permanent nature table. Creating a designated area like this puts value on his curiosity and love of nature, on his choices as regards what and how things could be presented, plus it puts value on the items themselves.

Developing A Vision for Play Time

INSET Day of Outdoor Fun Begins

At the tail end of the last academic year I simultaneously launched the Loose Parts Playground and claimed and opened a large garden space for the Junior School. Both were an instant hit with the students. Along with many discussions and mini workshops on play last year, and the set-up of our maker space, we had begun, as a staff, to re-think our approach to play time.This August’s INSET provided me with the platform to share my vision of how we can really take play to the next level. 

Sedentary Activity Trends in Preschool Children

Of late, I have been reading a large amount of literature on the importance of play, outdoor learning and physical activity levels of children, but the findings referenced in the 2012 research study by Copeland, K. et al really made me stop and think hard: “Children spend most (70%–83%) of their time being sedentary in child care—even when excluding time spent in naps and meals—and only spend 2% to 3% of the time in vigorous activities”. What irreparable damage are we doing to our young children, setting up such patterns of behaviour for their lives ahead?

30 Reasons Why Free Play Benefits Child Development - Infographic from AAA State of Play

A great info-graphic by this commercial playground equipment company. You can see it clearer here: https://www.aaastateofplay.com/30-reasons-why-free-play-benefits-child-development/

Equality for All

In this era of narrow-mindedness and fear-mongering, it is all the more important that educational establishments take on the responsibility of challenging the status quo and opening young minds to different versions of the same story.  I felt that our Junior School did just that this term by inviting a transgender woman in to speak to our students.  This may not seem such a big deal to some readers, but our school is situated in India, a country in which transgender people live almost exclusively on the margins of society and are frequently the subjects of abuse, discrimination and atrocities.

No Chair Day

Browsing through the website of The Early Years Alliance, I came upon a piece by UK-based music and movement specialist, Helen Batteley (https://www.eyalliance.org.uk/music-and-movement-encouraging-physical-activity). She was advocating for ‘No Chair Day’, an initiative to provoke teachers to think about the importance of physical activity for children and about alternatives to sitting in classrooms. The simplicity of the campaign appealed to me and I floated the idea to the Junior School staff. To my great pleasure, many took up the challenge, pitching the idea to their students and brainstorming ways learning could be re-designed without the need for sitting.

Creation of a Children's Garden

I'd had my eye on a particular patch of greenery for quite some time and had been observing it through the seasonal changes to gauge its potential as a children’s garden. It sits at the end of the Junior School corridor but the puzzling fact that it was surrounded by a thick hedge meant that we couldn’t access it. A number of reasons why we couldn’t use it had been given, but only ever anecdotally and none of the reasons seemed insurmountable. So I designed a proposal as a part of an outdoor learning and play spaces revamp, got the go-ahead and, one fine day, a entrance way cut appeared in the hedge and we were allowed in!