Free Play

Category: Early Childhood Education

Free play is the most important activity of childhood, the child’s true work and a time when every child deserves complete freedom. It is the finest preparation for life. There are no preset goals and no rules except those the child chooses. It nurtures creativity and lays the ground for later intellectual growth. Through play, children express their own experiences and feelings. Play connects the child with the world and opens the door to new insights. For a child, play matters as much as work does for adults. It leads toward socialization, imagination, initiative and the courage to create freely. It strengthens group dynamics and allows the child to become independent and self assured while developing a free will.

When children are at play, they are engaged in a creative and artistic act. We would not look over Van Gogh’s shoulder and say, 'Your painting is beautiful, yet how many fish exactly do you have here?' Just as artists require freedom to create, so children require freedom in play. Play holds a special and lasting value for them. It is the time and space in which they are free.

The most important educational aspect of play is that we step back from our rules and methods and entrust the child to his or her own capacities. What does a child do when left to personal resources? Through play the child tests how the outer world responds to personal action. The will to act awakens. In this way, through the effect of the will on outward things, the child educates the self through play in a manner quite different from anything we could achieve through our personalities or pedagogical principles. For this reason, we should interfere with children’s play as little as possible through adult reasoning. The more play grows out of what has not yet been pressed into concepts and out of what the child observes in the surroundings, the richer the play becomes. If we offer a toy that invites imitation of human gestures or the movement of things, whether a picture book or a simple plaything, we support development more effectively than by providing the finest construction sets. Such sets rely too heavily on abstract problem solving, which belongs more to the personal intellect than to gradual, hands on exploration of living movement that is grasped through doing rather than analysis. The less predetermined and overdesigned a toy is, the better. In that open space, a higher dimension that cannot be drummed into consciousness by logic alone can slowly awaken on its own, because the child enters the world not through explanation but through direct experience.

Until the change of the first teeth, a child learns chiefly through spontaneous imitation. What later life and work will demand is now activated through play, which for the child is a serious activity. The difference between a child’s play and work later in life is that work must serve external purposes to which we submit. The child seeks to unfold activity from inner nature and from the essence of human life. Play moves from the inside outward, while work moves from the outside inward.

One of the most important qualities that lives in children’s play is creative imagination. It should be cherished and nurtured. It brings warmth and intimacy into a child’s activity and is closely related to the child’s sensory life. In its care the child’s inner being can thrive, and the child’s slightly dreamlike stance toward life is protected. The opposite of imaginative play is a cold, abstract, combinatory activity. If this is favored in early childhood, it amplifies a malaise of our age, namely the dominance of trivial occupations that lack personality, genuine interest and warmth. Imaginative play foreshadows a priceless treasure, a deep capacity for concentration that later appears as devoted work on one’s own life, carried by intimacy and humanity. In the kindergarten, free play is supported with a variety of toys and materials, such as a sandpit, swings and rocking horses, simple hand sewn wool stuffed dolls, picture books, crayons, light wooden frames that, when draped with scarves, become inviting play corners, colorful scarves and gauzy cloths for the frames. Children form their own small groups, choose materials and pursue their activities. Adults join in as little as possible. The teacher keeps a gentle overview of the whole group, while also engaging in useful work for the kindergarten that inspires the children. For instance, the teacher may sew something for the dolls. Some children will draw near, watch for a while and then wish to sew as well. We offer fabric, needles and colorful wool and let them stitch freely. Original rhythmic patterns often appear. We do not give children ready made templates, nor anything that would limit their own creative activity. In the garden we tend the beds and the flower borders and gather leaves, among other simple tasks.

Beyond what arises from imitating adults, children are also quietly guided in free play by the atmosphere created around them. If we strive to offer impressions that are truthful, clear, warm and beautiful, they will be reflected in play. Above all, a young child should be protected from influences from the adult world that are not yet appropriate. If we can avoid impressions that may shock and pull the child out of a natural course of development, the finest strengths of childhood will come to the fore in free play. If, on the other hand, the child is pulled away from a natural and often slower unfolding, a premature form of self awareness may take root and the child may become dissatisfied and difficult. A compassionate life shared with the child, full of love, has a liberating and healing effect and becomes the most effective means an educator can use when guiding even the most challenging children. Over time we ourselves develop an inner sense that can read the subtle signs which tell us whether a group of children is playing in a natural current guided by imagination, creative, harmonious and truly childlike, or whether play is becoming chaotic and fragmented and about to sharpen into rivalry and quarrel where adult experience must intervene.

(excerpt from the notes of Elisabeth Grunelius)