Start panicking! There’s talk of a National Strategy for play according to an article on the BBC news website. (Look here)
Can you imagine? The government have totally trashed education with National Strategies, heaven forbid they’d do the same with play. It’s like they want to control every little bit of children’s childhoods.
When we were home educating we let the kids play loads. It didn’t necessarily involve us although we may have provided a starting point, as much of it was inspired from the things around them; tools, utensils, materials, boxes, cartons, cloth and packaging, tables make great dens covered by a sheet. They played through exploration and discovery; with water, mud, foodstuffs, a variety of materials, basically anything we had in the house or garden. They constructed, measured, estimated, crafted, copied, role played, experimented, improvised. You don’t need expensive equipment or materials packaged as Early Learning to inspire play. Their imaginations are the best resource they could use.
These activities stimulate their brain and expands skills. Play develops their mind and body, increases understanding of their world, self motivation and intelligence and affects their academic learning later on. Play is never a waste of their time. In fact I believe it is the reason why home educated kids do so well later in life because having the opportunity to play, as well as increasing skills and intelligence, helps them understand what life is all about and how to get on with it independently. If we take control of their play away from them, as we’ve taken away all control over their learning and scared them to death through so-called health and safety, we can hardly expect them to flick a switch and know how to be independent again when Unis and employers want them to.
Let the children play, I say. But please, please, please, let the strategies come from them.
And if you are a parent who didn’t get much chance to play as a child and are short of ideas there’s plenty of inspiration from the National Trust on the article and in some of the other Home schoolers’ blogs I listed on this post here.
Ross Mountney's Notebook 
That is really scary! Will their be how to walk standards next, or how to talk standards? I agree wholeheartedly with you….give children lots of fun and interesting things to play with and let them do their thing. It’s something they do naturally. I attribute my kids huge vocabulary and problem-solving abilities to the dozens of hours a week they get to play and direct their own learning. I’m so very grateful I’m able to give them this gift.
Thanks Christina, lovely comment. And I agree with you; self directed play and learning makes for self directed young people later in life! x
tendthevegetablepatch.blogspot.com/
A personal record of our home ed journey and some musings on why we do the things we do.
Thanks Heidi, your blog looks lovely. x
frightening. i recently wrote some musings on play on my blog. scary to think that the medium through which children make sense of the world around them and explore it, might be controlled. Defeats the reason for its being.
Thanks Heidi – play is one of the best ways kids learn about the world for themselves, but politicians might not want people learning for themselves, in case we challenge their idiocies! send me a link to your blog sometime, I’d like to take a look and can’t seem to link back from your comments.
{sigh}
Goodness, gracious me! What next? Are they going to be telling Mildred, The Laboratory cat, how to hunt? No, of course, they won’t because every cat lover knows that cats wouldn’t stand for it. Enough said!