Designs For Living and Learning

Deb Curtis and Maggie Carter explore how you can teach children by setting up the right environment. Anyone who’s read Harry Wong’s First Day of School (a classic how-to guide for teachers) knows that clean classrooms are essential, but what about the layout? What about the color scheme and the furniture?  This book, which I might mention is from New Zealand, shows many examples of daycare and preschools that encourage constructive play for children.

The first, and most obvious things we see, are the water tables and sand tables. I remember these from when I was a kid, we loved playing with the sand. But there was something else that I saw in the photo of the New Zealand preschool, and that was the toolbench. It was at a height the kids could reach, and had lots of small hammers, nails, screw drivers, pliers, etc. We had a tool bench when I was in kindergarten, but few US preschools have them now out of fear of lawsuits. I can’t think of anything better for a 5 year old boy than a toolbench and some nails to pound.

Some of the schools (or afterschool places) build what I can “adventure playgrounds” with lots of apparatus for the kids to climb. You have slides, ladders, swings, ropes, nets, decent poles, and tires to play with, and you’ll keep the kids busy for hours. We used to have these playgrounds all over the USA, but they were all torn down in the 1990’s because of, you guessed, it, lawsuits. Nowadays, the average kids’ playground looks like a Fisher Price playset blown up to life size. Eight year old kids are now spending all their time with TV and electronics, getting into trouble, while 30 years ago they were jumping off wooden forts and landing in nets. There’s a new miniature adventure playground in Washington Square Park, here in NYC, consisting of an artificial valley, covered in rubber and astroturf, spanned by a net. Kids love to play on it, so maybe there is hope.

One way you can encourage healthy physical play is to repurpose materials. Bead curtains are a good way to start; you tell the children that they’re going to learn to make the curtains themselves, then teach children to string beads together, and it becomes the curtain for the classroom. Wooden boards and sawhorses can be used to make slides and see-saws, and if the kids want a sandpit, teach them to sand the boards, drill holes, and screw the boards together. Then let them drag the bags of sand to fill it. The only hazard is that after building their own sandpit, they may be tee weary (or wary) to want to use it. But the younger kids probably will!

It’s fun to see a book like this in an age of paranoia over kids getting hurt. I saw pictures throughout this book of kids playing with old wooden boards, wooden blocks, water, plastic pipes, and mud. There were kids digging holes, getting dirty, and doing all sorts of things that would make the average kid a mess. But this is how kids learn naturally, by doing, not by staring at a screen. There’s one thing, however, that this book left out, and that is passive academic learning. One way to get kid a head start for school is to sneak in letters and words, so I would suggest painting the playground tarmac with letters, to “get them acquainted.” Maybe paint a giant map of the USA on the ground or the school wall?