The decline of imagination?
We have this thing called the Zone at the school where I work. It's reward play-time for kids who have made good choices. I supervise it for a half-hour per day.
Today I had a group of 10 year old girls in the Zone. Two settled to coloring and playing Who's Who. One discovered that among the many toys in the Zone are some bits of dress-up clothes and a bear puppet. She began to play out a show with the bear, telling jokes and commenting on them. She then donned a hula skirt before adding a police vest and roping her friend into pretending to be a bank robber so she could arrest her.
This should be a normal day in the Zone and on the playground. The sad thing is, it's not. It's a rarity and a joy to witness. I work among around 450 children and I rarely hear the words, "Let's pretend that...". I rarely see kids being dragons or superheros or pirates. Maybe they're just doing it when I'm not around, but from my experience of creative club the other day* and from the lack of this sort of play in the Zone, I think it's just not happening.
I think it's a tragedy. The child in the Zone even said that she was embarrassing herself in front of her friends (though she didn't seem particularly bothered about it). I said that there was nothing wrong with playing and that as late as 12 years old I had imagined myself on a pirate ship (never mind all the pretending I did as a teen in drama).
How do we fix this? Does it need to be fixed? I think it does, but I place enormous value in using your imagination.
There's an experimental program in the U.S. called Tools of the Mind and I'm intrigued by what they do there and how it relates to self-management and creativity. Something to keep exploring.
* We were making up a story and the children had to come up with some problems that the characters could run into before reaching their goal. They came up with 1. everyone getting locked in their house, 2. a wall with a key hanging out of reach, and 3. another wall that became covered in diamonds once I suggested that it might be special in some way. No monsters (though there were monster scratches on the second wall), no magic, no volcanoes, no pits of snakes. Nope. A locked door, a wall and another wall. I should note that despite my internal disappointment, I praised them for their ideas and was enthusiastic about helping the children incorporate them into the story.
Today I had a group of 10 year old girls in the Zone. Two settled to coloring and playing Who's Who. One discovered that among the many toys in the Zone are some bits of dress-up clothes and a bear puppet. She began to play out a show with the bear, telling jokes and commenting on them. She then donned a hula skirt before adding a police vest and roping her friend into pretending to be a bank robber so she could arrest her.
This should be a normal day in the Zone and on the playground. The sad thing is, it's not. It's a rarity and a joy to witness. I work among around 450 children and I rarely hear the words, "Let's pretend that...". I rarely see kids being dragons or superheros or pirates. Maybe they're just doing it when I'm not around, but from my experience of creative club the other day* and from the lack of this sort of play in the Zone, I think it's just not happening.
I think it's a tragedy. The child in the Zone even said that she was embarrassing herself in front of her friends (though she didn't seem particularly bothered about it). I said that there was nothing wrong with playing and that as late as 12 years old I had imagined myself on a pirate ship (never mind all the pretending I did as a teen in drama).
How do we fix this? Does it need to be fixed? I think it does, but I place enormous value in using your imagination.
There's an experimental program in the U.S. called Tools of the Mind and I'm intrigued by what they do there and how it relates to self-management and creativity. Something to keep exploring.
* We were making up a story and the children had to come up with some problems that the characters could run into before reaching their goal. They came up with 1. everyone getting locked in their house, 2. a wall with a key hanging out of reach, and 3. another wall that became covered in diamonds once I suggested that it might be special in some way. No monsters (though there were monster scratches on the second wall), no magic, no volcanoes, no pits of snakes. Nope. A locked door, a wall and another wall. I should note that despite my internal disappointment, I praised them for their ideas and was enthusiastic about helping the children incorporate them into the story.