By Peckie Peters, Head Teacher
"I’m a pirate, too!” A girl joyfully exclaims as she joins a playmate in hot pursuit of another child. The children play vigorously, using their whole bodies in this game, as they run up and down the hill with big grins on their faces.
Children need multiple opportunities for physical exploration like this each day. The National Association for Sport and Physical Education recommends that preschool age children should accumulate at least an hour of structured physical activity, facilitated or supported by an adult (such as playing with a ball, dancing to music), and from 60 minutes to several hours of unstructured physical activity, initiated by the child (such as climbing, digging, playing at the playground) per day. In addition to building strong hearts, bones and muscles, opportunities for physical play help children develop the disposition to be active adults, which has numerous long-term health benefits. Physical play enables children to develop necessary control over their bodies’ movements and helps them develop coordination. Research shows a strong link between active play and brain development. Active movement facilitates the development of new synapses among brain cells and supports brain development in general. Additionally, it encourages the development of confidence and social interaction skills. Clearly, it is important to encourage children to engage in active play.
Children learn to independently navigate climbing structures, which can be reconfigured when they are ready for more challenge.
At Bing we are fortunate to have large outdoor spaces with varying terrain that invite children to engage actively and physically. They can run up and down hills, across bridges and stages, or balance on large logs as they move through the yards. Trees provide shade and give children opportunities for climbing and spaces for pretend play. Equipment like swings, slides and climbing structures encourage children to explore and be active. Like many aspects of play, competence in and on these apparatus comes from repeated experiences and practice. Guided instruction by adults can help children understand the motor movement but mastery comes when children “feel” how to do it themselves. In the process, they develop upper and lower body strength, coordination, flexibility, balance and increased cardiovascular flow.
Bing’s environment enables children to create their own physical challenges.
In the Twos yard a set of stairs leads up to the slide. On each side of the stairs are tall slanted handrails with three parallel slats, resembling a ladder. A child noticed them one day as he went up the slide and paused for a moment. Somewhat cautiously he stuck one foot on the bottom rail and balanced on one foot. His face registered his belief that he could do it and he began to climb. Though he had previously demonstrated solid climbing skills, it was an atypical climbing space and slightly risky, so the teacher moved close enough to support him if needed. He made it successfully to the top rung, with his upper body hanging somewhat precariously over the top, and then carefully descended. Another child noticed him climbing, his face demonstrating his excitement at the idea of trying. As the first child descended, the observer began to climb the railing on the opposite side. He went up two rungs, said “Whoa!” and began to climb down. “That was high!” he announced as he reached the bottom. For both boys, the initially challenging experience helped develop a sense of their own mastery.
Bing’s environment also is set up with many types of moveable equipment, including boards, climbing structures and large barrels. These can be moved around the yard and can be configured to offer more or less challenge, depending on the skill level and developmental needs of the children. This winter, in West AM, teachers decided to build a gangplank to extend the children’s ongoing pirate play; we placed a short red board at the edge of a platform so it jutted out and rested on a nearby tree stump. A child tried it first and announced that it was “too easy.” “The board is too fat and too short,” he explained, so we replaced it with one that was longer and more narrow. He crossed it slowly and independently, both arms out to the side for balance. The second time he left his arms by his side and by his third attempt he moved with ease. Another child had a similar experience. When he first saw it, he said, “That’s too hard. I need a hand.” After crossing with a teacher’s hand, he was ready to try alone. As he began to cross, he suggested that maybe holding one finger would help. As he reached the end he exclaimed, “Now I can do it!” and went back to try independently.
By the time another child crossed the gangplank, at some children’s requests, a teacher had connected it to the larger climbing structure, which became their ship. The child carefully crossed with one arm out to the side and the other holding a teacher’s hand. Next she climbed over an A-frame, crossed another wider bridge and maneuvered a second A-frame. She hesitated as she reached the quite steep incline that led down from it. She surveyed it with her eyes for just a moment and then balanced carefully as she took small steps to the bottom of the board. There she paused and looked up with an enormous smile that reflected her sense of accomplishment. “I made it this far!”
Multiple opportunities and repeated practice to try a variety of types of physical exploration help children develop both competence and confidence. Thoughtful preparation of the environment to allow for appropriate challenge and opportunities for collaboration are an integral part of this process for teachers. Still, there is play that emerges from children that may elicit concern in adults, often called “rough-and-tumble” or “big body” play, that requires a different kind of preparation. The vigorous pirate play described above falls into this category, as does tree climbing, wrestling and much of the active play that children choose. As teachers, we need to understand this play so we can support it well, and help children to incorporate positive play strategies, rather than squelch it as something that is dangerous or aggressive. In fact, in this kind of play children learn to control their bodies and their feelings, to communicate and cooperate with peers, to recover from physical and emotional scrapes that may occur, to recognize social cues and to take risks, all of which help children to expand their cognitive functions and increase their resiliency.
So, what does this play look like and how do teachers support it safely? First, it is critical to differentiate it from aggression. When children engage in big body play their facial expressions are happy, they participate willingly and they keep coming back for more. This makes sense when you compare it to true aggression, where children’s expressions are usually sad or angry, there is typically one child who dominates and children are eager to get away as quickly as they can.
In West AM, we have been helping children to be skilled active players in big body play. The first step is for teachers to understand the need for this kind of play and to be willing to embrace our own concerns so that we can support it more fully. When it first arose, teachers questioned children about the motivation in their game. The children explained, “The good team tries to get the bad team and they all go on the ship (a curved tree branch near the sand area that they can climb onto).” All the players liked to swing their arms toward the other players as they pretend “fight.” The first step was to establish rules so no one got hurt. “Remember it’s just pretend so keep the distance,” a teacher coaches as several children “battle.” Their faces are concentrating but they are all smiling as they try hard to not let their bodies touch. “Great job. You’ve really got it!” the teacher continues. As others joined, children explained the rules and took over their enforcement. Newcomers had to learn and practice to become as skilled as the original players, but the enjoyment of the play inspired them to learn. Still, even the best play can get tiring, so the teacher initiated a “time out rest area”—a blanket where you could sit when you wanted a break from the game. Children visited it frequently for short periods of time.
The following week, the play moved into a new area of the classroom. As the children had developed more trust in each other, their chasing progressed to include more rough-and-tumble play. The teachers recognized the risk of this new direction in their play and worked with the children to establish safe boundaries.
Big body play is now an integral part of our classroom community and while many children have become skilled participants, teachers continue to be vigilant about supporting new players or conflicts that arise. As Frances M. Carlson states in her book, Big Body Play: “Research demonstrates convincingly that there is physical, social, emotional, and cognitive value in children’s big body play. As early childhood education professionals, we are entrusted with the responsibility of providing children what best serves their developmental needs… .” At Bing, we take this responsibility seriously because in doing so we help children gain many important skills they need to fully engage with the world around them.