Many of you will know I have written about this before…
I have a real passion and innate desire to allow children to be free in their own creativity.
In our setting gone are the days where we create a Gruffalo cave (I’m not being funny… How many Gruffalo caves have you been in? Me neither and even if I had I’m not sure what play I’d do in there?) I hold my hands up and say that I used to be that teacher that would print off a load of keywords, spend hours laminating them and stick them up in “MY” role play area, and expect the Kidkets to sit with a clipboard and write them down, or read them and use them in their conversation! Of course, they didn’t use them… All that was happening was a big old waste of a few hours spent at the laminator!
What I do do is spend my weekends trawling round various supermarkets and shops asking for boxes so that I can provide my children with a great range of different types, sized, shaped boxes that can be whatever the heck they like!
Today was one of those days my heart felt happy, and a few goose bumps appeared on my arms! (Ok it doesn’t happen every day- but you know that feeling when it does!)
I looked over to our role play and this is what greeted me…
I literally whooped and cheered! I think I perhaps made a few children jump with fright in the process! (Oops- surely they are used to this crazy lady by now!!)
I was totally blown away by the creativity, craftsmanship and collaboration that had gone into this design. Not only had they cut the paper into a flag shape, drawn the skull and crossbones, attached it to the mast (big tube) tied the mast onto the box with string! But they also presented their plan!
“We decided what we wanted it to be first” they said “So we drew it!”
And there we have it… Creativity in its simplest form!!
This is a re-blog post originally posted by Pennie Parry and published with kind permission. The post was originally published in 2015, and updated in 2019 by UKEd Editorial in accordance with website changes.
You can read more by Pennie by Clicking Here
The original post can be found here.
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