A Box with Three Lives
On a Monday morning, Owen’s dad brought a large cardboard box to the class after a weekend delivery of a new washing machine. The teacher, Ms. Mary, set the box in the middle of the meeting circle and said, “H-mmm, I wonder what we could do with this, would you like to play with it?” A chorus of voices ensued with many children talking all at once. Ms. Mary said, “let’s get a big piece of paper and write down all of our ideas and then maybe we can decide.” A few minutes later, the list included turning the box into a space ship, boat, zoo, race car, and bus.
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The children decided after much discussion that it should become a spooky house. Ms. Mary helped the children generate a list of needed materials, create a design team, and assign jobs. After the house was finished and the children had played in it for several days, they decided they wanted to share it with the children in another classroom. They made additional items such as spiders, paper ghosts, and bats. They recorded a sound track of scary noises and wrote invitations, and, when the other children came to visit the house, took turns as tour guides using dress-up clothes from the dramatic play area.
When Ms. Mary noticed that the children’s interest in the box had waned, she asked them if they were finished. Instead of discarding it, the children decided that since it already had windows and doors, they could repaint it to turn it into the Three Little Pigs’ brick house, which they worked on over the next two weeks. Play in the box ended only when it finally collapsed, but then, since it had been painted on the outside to look like bricks, they cut it up to make a road on the playground. One box, weeks of inventive play!
Stop and Reflect
Can you think of other materials that might provide the kind of open-ended play described above? What might be the pros and cons of each?
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Teachers may be reluctant to encourage block play when they observe it devolving into seemingly random or destructive activity. However, children will benefit from more, rather than less, building time to fully engage with the process. In classrooms where time and supply must be limited, teachers can create ways in which structures in progress can be preserved from one play period to the next, and they or the children can document or photograph the children’s work.
Early childhood curricula may diverge significantly in the logic and labels applied to center locations, how boundaries are established, the level of emphasis devoted to specific areas, or materials and strategies used to support children’s interactions. For example, Montessori classrooms include an area called “practical life,” in which children use everyday things like pitchers, spoons, brooms and dusters that would be consistent with the concept of a housekeeping center in other models. But the intended outcomes of these two seemingly comparable activity centers and the means by which they are achieved are very different. Regardless of interpretation, all early childhood curricula devote considerable effort to articulating the way in which play serves as an organizing element for the curriculum.