Exploring the Playground:
A Creative Schools Grant – 2007 - 2008
As the school year draws to a close, teaching and learning continue at Hardy. The locations of the “lessons” may shift: a field trip to a beach or a museum reinforces concepts and content; a PE class is conducted in the shade of our Lake Street lawn. But the learning continues, even for the adults. One of the final faculty meetings of the year will be devoted to adult learning as teams of teachers share their work around a question they identified in the fall as being essential to student learning. Over the course of the school year, teams of teachers used faculty meeting time to work and learn together on behalf of their students.
Reflecting on these final weeks of the school year, I realize that one of the lessons we adults have learned has come from our children. Through the “Exploring the Playground” presentation, our children taught all of us something important about the playground and what it means to them.
For an hour, on a beautiful May evening, our playground was transformed into a theater for “Exploring the Playground”. Family and friends sat in the space typically occupied by kickball, basketball, and hula-hoops. Our children waited in cross-grade groupings in the space they usually gather each morning as they wait to enter the school. On cue, these groups sprang to action. Using climbing structures, slides, swings, and playground equipment, they demonstrated for their audience what it meant to them to be in this world of the playground...a world truly their own.
The idea for this extraordinary arts experience, also involving poets and writers, began three years ago. Former Hardy School principal, Jerry Carmody, and Hardy's staff wanted to use the arts to complete the final stage of a concentrated focus on issues of inclusion and exclusion among our children. Guy Van Duser and Nikki Hu's talents with children were well known to our community. Nicole Libresco, co-chair of Hardy's Enrichment Committee, secured a prestigious Creative Schools Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Our PTO and teaching staff shared and supported the vision...and “Exploring the Playground” was born.
Using poetry and prose, we asked our children to write about their experiences on the playground. We expected to read accounts of feeling lonely, or being left out, or feeling unsure of friendships: the typical issues that children everywhere can face when among large groups of their peers. Surely these issues were the ones of which we, the adults in their lives, were abundantly aware. This was the “learning” we expected. What the children wrote about most often, however, surprised and delighted us! Their writings revealed a special world, a world of imagination, of fast-paced games, of release from class work, of lighthearted fun. Incidents that, to our grown-up eyes, seem a worry (like boys and girls chasing each other) were revealed as “not a problem!” A basketball game that seems to us like every other is, in a fifth-grader's mind, THE game, and full of importance. And the swings are not swings at all but the means by which a first grader becomes a bird.
I felt honored to be invited into this child's world on that May evening. It helped me remember the playground of my elementary school days. It was a magical place where the grown-ups, so important to us inside the school walls, became irrelevant to the play at hand. We children took care of each other in ways that were not obvious to adults. Thanks to our children’s sharing of their world of the playground, I can see that they are very much as we were: imaginative, inquisitive, creative, collaborative, and eager to make the most of every precious minute in “their world”. How fitting to have such a lesson come from our children at the end of another school year.
Deborah D’Amico