I’ve been thinking lately about the anti-intellectualism that has become so present in our social and political culture in the west, and the ways in which it can disallow our children from becoming articulate. Even the word ‘articulate’ can sound like it carries a certain kind of smugness we might want to avoid, but I truly think that articulateness is important and should not be undervalued.

The suggestion of course made by much children’s programming and literature today, and in how adults talk to children in general, is that language must be brought down for children to understand it. This includes the implicit understanding that the acquisition of language is a rational process more than anything else.

What I have found is that even when young children don’t intellectually understand more complex words, they can be joyfully exposed to the innate rhythms, cadences, and musicality of language – sometimes specifically when we introduce things to them which may seem a bit “above their level”. Surely a large part of literacy lies in being able to get inside a language and make it sing. Young children are amazing at doing this, and often can (as so many of us know) be the most natural poets!

Dr. Seuss books, as a lot of older popular children’s books, can be great for the kind of exposure to language I’m talking about. These books tell great, original and wacky stories that kids can easily understand, while also using words that provide some of the bedrock for eventual greater literacy (even when those words are not yet intellectually understood). One of the current favourites of some of the three-year-olds I work with is The 500 hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, which tells a story that they find truly captivating – even though the author uses more advanced words such as “procession” and “astonishment”, amongst others.

With so much children’s literature, television, movies, and music that speaks down to children, we would do well indeed to remember that one of the foundations of literacy lies in an immersion in language that is not intentionally constrained or dumbed down, and rather which is demonstrated as something with a complex and beautiful life of its own. Playing with language is also generally, as already suggested, hugely fun for children, and is listed as one of the sixteen play types (communicative play).

Exposure to new language, be it real or made up, seemingly simple or more complex, has incredible benefits for children of all ages. When children are exposed to the fuller rhythms and cadences of their language(s), they may more easily become articulate members of their communities. Children, in this, may more easily come to express themselves, in their developing lives, in a manner which is more fully imaginative (the imagination being where the intellect and emotions meet, in creativity).

We would do well to remember that, as Northrop Frye suggests, “a democracy cannot function without articulate citizens”. And we would do well, I believe, to remember that early exposure to articulate language may lay the foundation for the development of the kinds of citizens we will surely need in the future.

-Cam

This is a re-post of this month’s Guest Post for Calgary Child’s Play. Check out the original post here! Thanks as always to CCP for hosting us!

The other evening, I approached the afternoon Adventure Club in one of our favourite green spaces, the Marché Des Possibles, to say hi after my day of working in the Playschool had ended. I quickly found myself stuck in a snowball-throwing battle for supremacy over that acre of whiteness among the evergreens of the Marché. Snowball fighting season had returned! The children Megan works with in that group, of ages 5-9, include a few natural snowball fighters who saw in me a worthy opponent. I felt a surge of excitement come over me when the first child threw his snowball at me!

A few days earlier, before fighting these Adventure Clubbers, I had a spontaneous snowball fight with some of the parents who came to pick up their children at the local playground, at the end of one of our Playschool days. As we were throwing snowballs at one another – I’m not sure who even started it – I was reminded of my poor aim and that my left eye has very poor vision, while my right eye (which has 20/20 vision) compensates for it. I’m not usually so aware of this fact in my daily life. I wear glasses at home but have mostly neglected contact lenses otherwise. When it comes time that I need to aim at something precisely, though, I have learned to sometimes close my left eye and let my right eye do the work. If I don’t do this, I might end up missing the target by quite a lot.

I hadn’t needed to employ this technique for quite a while, though, and had forgotten how important it is to me and to my survival in such battles. So, as I was throwing snowballs with these parents, I was consistently missing them by quite a lot – snowballs flying far from my moving targets. Leaving the situation I felt both giddy and frustrated as I remembered both how fun it is to have snowball fights, and what it was I wasn’t doing that could have helped me in my game

So, by the time I met with the Adventure Club group, I knew what I needed to do to challenge them in the way they wanted to be challenged. I prepared my snowballs while they did the same, and I ran throughout the Marché, bobbing and weaving excitedly, imagining myself as a boxer, preparing for the fight. This time around, aware of my limitations, I closed my left eye when necessary and took aim in my highly asymmetrical way. I remembered what I hadn’t done in my last battle, and I knew how to get them this time!

When we play in a way that allows us to take stock of who we are, we can remember what our limitations and our strengths are. We can begin to approach what we need to do in order to strengthen our senses, capacities, and will. In Playwork we are aware of how ‘rough and tumble play’ often has everything to do with gauging personal strength, flexibility, and our own physical capacities. It allows us to exist more consciously in our bodies, and reengage more deeply with who we are as physical beings.

For me, being reminded of this physical adaptation I needed to make to be a good snowball fighter had everything to do with one of the most positive benefits of rough play – being more in tune with my physicality, in the name of self-reliance and confidence-building. I love being in a green space like the Marché and thinking of myself as making the kind of physical adaptations that are necessary to my survival, as an animal in my small space of wildness. And I loved being reminded that winter could feel as just as active, if not more, of a season as the summer. Most excitedly, I was reminded this winter, as I am every winter, of the importance of snowball fighting.

-Cam

P.S. : It is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to capture great pics of snowball fights in action – sheer survival in face of a group of kids is key! But we managed to snap a great Instagram video earlier 🙂

After a gloriously mild fall, winter came in with a bang on Sunday night with a big dump of snow and temperatures below zero all week. Many grumbled, but many rejoiced. I fell strongly into the latter category. Last winter it rained A LOT and while the mud kitchens were fun, being outside in the freezing rain was tough. Cold, rainy days means winter gear gets soaked through pretty much instantly.

My general love of snow and the memories of how many mittens I went through every day last winter made me RIDICULOUSLY EXCITED for the snow fall this week. The kids too. Yes, it is a bit colder outside, but not when we are running around, making snowballs, building snow forts, and climbing up the hills of the Mont Royal and sliding down on our bums (or the Human Toboggan, Megan). Plus, look how dreamy the Champ des Possibles is at this time of year!!

A long-time popular winter activity for kids is eating snow and icicles. This week we had snow ice cream, popsicles, soup, marshmallows, and even snow croissants. YES, I know that snow and icicles are dirty and germy. I make sure kids only eat clean snow, so freshly fallen, and of course without any tracks or any sign of life around it, and no icicles off parked cars (they try – and I’ll admit I ate my fair share of car exhaust popsicles as a kid). One day at Adventure Club, the kids went on a full-on icicle hunt, searching for them all over the playground.

So much of spending time with children, our own or someone else’s, is emotional and heavily influenced in our own experience of childhood. When I see kids engaging in a simple act of eating snow off of a plant at the Champ, I think back to my own memories of seeking snow to eat as a child, and how much joy this brought me. Likewise for icicles. Since icicles require a pretty specific temperature shift, they aren’t around that much.

During the long Saskatchewan and Albertan winters, my classmates would always play this sort of game that would end in giving the same “advice”: “Don’t eat yellow snow”. I don’t remember the specifics, but we taught each other what was safe and what was pee-covered. No one wants to eat pee.

Kind of like play fighting, trying to stop something like eating snow is not easy – if I tell them not to do it, point blank, they will do it when I’m not looking anyways, and why they shouldn’t do it doesn’t make sense. Better to teach them what kind of snow is safe to eat and when they can eat it – IE, the fresh stuff, or at the very least, the white stuff. It brings joy, and memories around winter that will last a lifetime. Reverence for the natural world – and feeling happy and having fun – has far greater positive implications for their future health than the potential of alleged germs in freshly fallen snow.

PSST: I still eat snow sometimes. You know, for the kids, SWEAR. Parents/educators, if you haven’t done this in a while, or ever, I suggest you give it a go. It tastes good. Let’s just wait for some new flakes to fall first….
Megan

At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when one is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. – Keats

Having recently returned to Montreal from touring in Europe with my band (Vesuvio Solo), I thought it would be a good time for me to discuss my life as a musician – especially since, as I see it, it relates so much to my life as an educator with children. I find myself always returning to the understanding that art and play are deeply related, and that the play-based work I do with children relates so much and so easily to my work as a musician.

I grew up in a musical family, love making music, and was always conscious of wanting to compose music and write songs. That I was so conscious of this fact, though, actually made it very difficult to compose freely – for a very long time, in fact! I was always searching for a vital source of inspiration – one that would allude me because I was so preoccupied with finding it. After seriously studying and playing guitar from a young age, in my teens I turned to trying to hone my skills as a lyricist. I wanted to be a songwriter, and becoming a skilled lyricist seemed the logical next step. I constantly tried to write from personal experience, seeking to shed light on my own feelings. Some of what I wrote at the time seemed good enough that I kept going, but I was aware of the fact that I wasn’t getting where I wanted to go in the pursuit.

Finally, in my late teens, I befriended a young singer-songwriter a few years older than me. He took me under his wing, and wanted me to play some shows with him. I was captivated by my friend’s lyrics in particular – the way he strung beautiful images together so fluidly. Finally, one day during a rehearsal I asked him how he’d written the lyrics to a particular song of his that was my favourite. I asked, ‘what were you trying to say there?’

He told me that he didn’t know at all what he’d been ‘trying to say’ with the song – and that he never quite did, when he wrote. He went on to explain that usually he wrote when he was really inspired by the strong feeling of something in particular – often just music that he loved, but sometimes other art or things in his life that he found beautiful or captivating – and that he could find himself writing for its own sake, very easily and playfully if he was lucky enough to be able to ride some of these feelings out… being in this kind of state of presence long enough to be able to compose a song.

The next morning I took my 18-year-old self into the sunny front room of my family’s childhood home, with a guitar and with paper and pencil. I had my friend’s song from the day before and his words running through my head and I began to play something on the guitar that was something like what he played in his song. Then I started to sing something, channeling his voice for a while – until something of my own voice began to emerge, and then I was writing freely… I suppose in a state of negative capability. I wrote vigorously for the next few moments – both melody and words that came from no place of conscious struggle. And when I was through with writing, I could tell that the song was both uniquely my own, and also the product of my influences (especially that of this particular friend who ended up teaching me so much). He gave me the starting place, and the the objects, as it were, to play with… and the creative mind plays with the objects it loves, as Carl Jung said, to piece together something original. Being able to embrace this playful and imaginative state of negative capability would inform my future life both as a composer of music, and in my play-centred work with children and adults in our L&M community and beyond. Being passionate about unstructured play relates to my experience of what it is to write music, to be creative, and to pursue creativity and imaginative exploration for its own sake.

-Cam

I found out mid-way through last week that some of our kids have been calling L&M’s day camp “Freedom Camp”, because they get to “do whatever they want”. Kids have talked to me about this previously – that they like coming to what we call “Adventure Camp” because they can pick what they want to do, and there aren’t that many rules. We make it clear from the get-go that the few rules we have at camp are to keep kids safe and healthy, which makes it easy for kids to understand and respect them.

As an advocate for true, child-led play, and a student of Playwork, learning this camp nickname makes me pretty happy. Freedom allows us to be creative and innovative, to daydream, to stand up for what we believe in, to experiment, and to get to know ourselves and each other. Kids -and adults- need freedom to allow for growth and discovery, within and outside of moments of play. I’ve been continuously blown away by all the cool inventions, games, art experiments, and construction projects that the group has thought up this summer, be it with our large collection of loose parts at the Marché, to found objects at the Champ, to equipment at the playground. From making new friends, to climbing higher than they’ve ever climbed, to learning to love getting muddy or paint covered, to dealing with conflict in healthier ways, the open spaces we visit and open-ended nature of camp, along with the respect and encouragement of Camp Leaders and each other, has helped kids grow leaps and bounds throughout the summer. Some kids who were grossed out at the thought of touching a snail ended up being the most passionate snail hunters, letting snails crawl on their hands and even faces and making enormous “cities” for the snails to play in. Kids who hated getting dirty became “paint queens”, covering themselves head-to-toe with paint. All of this was done on their time, and following their lead.There was no schedule where at 10:30 AM everyone was required to touch a snail, I didn’t “teach” kids how to play Pokemon out of sticks and bottle caps, make cell phones out of rocks, or construct a hotel out of boxes, they just did it, on their own, freely, and at their own pace. I’ll be reflecting on some more of my observations from Adventure Camp and exploring some of the major play themes that came up in greater detail in future blog posts.

Today is the first day of the last week of “Freedom Camp”, and I can’t help but feel nostalgic about the summer that is about to end. Knowing that I will continue seeing many of the kids, and of course some new faces, via our after-school Adventure Club and fall Pop-Up Adventure Playgrounds, in addition to getting to see some of my smaller pals in our Junior Adventure Club and Playschool programs, helps make the end of day camp seem easier to swallow.

I feel confident that kids and their parents will take their experiences at camp and create opportunities for unstructured playtime throughout the school year. I also hope parents (and teachers!) will have chances to observe –without taking over – some of the magical play moments that their kids create when given the space to do so.

Thanks everyone for a wonderful and playful summer!

-Megan