Mastery & Play

Mastery & Play

I’ve watched our Forest school participants play outdoors this spring with great enthusiasm – connecting with their natural world, creating and imagining, role playing, and immersing themselves in their own mini-dramas played out against a green backdrop of young growth and spring flowers.
It is so rewarding to see the children have the time and place to play in this way, especially as I know there is so much more happening for them in this environment than more traditional play spaces. The children are in deep play and exploration. They are experimenting, challenging themselves and one another, discovering truths about forces and absolutes, finding out about natural consequences, feeling, touching, smelling and hearing everything in acute magnification. This self-led exploration is so engrossing, sparking interest known only to the child’s internal needs – fascination at the tiniest stone, absorption in the feeling of rotten wood, picking at it, enjoying the smell and texture. Too often adults interrupt this deep discovery to come and ‘Learn’ something.
So how is this sort of play so different?
Children need space and time to create their own outcomes: many of our adult led ‘invitations to play’ have a pre-conceived outcome – outcomes set from above by the adult. In a traditional setting it is necessary to constantly monitor work, and set goals to ‘progress’ children down a particular path to mastery . My observation of play shows me that if left to set their own level of mastery, the outcomes are not always the ones intended by the invitation by the adult.
For example – Painting a flower on a piece of paper. Paints are carefully put out with the correct colours by the adults, green for the stem, red and white to make pink for the petals. The paper is laid out. The brushes carefully put in each paint pot. Examples of flowers are placed around to give inspiration.
I wonder what the child sees on entering the space? Do the flowers go in the pots to make a mixture? What happens if I put Green in Red what will that look like? This texture is so nice (as he mixes the two colours), Can I use my hands, what will that feel like? Can I paint my hands, what will that feel like? Can I paint the table? What if I put all those colours on that paper what will that do? Can I use something else to put the paint on the paper? Maybe the flowers? What if we mix everything together?
So you see now that the outcome is experiential – the end result will not look anything like a flower, but the child will have truly discovered the paint in all its forms – living it fully – using the flowers, knowing how they feel and look but not making an impression of them on paper. This is the sort of Mastery I want children to achieve.