Background - International Council for Children's Play

Fig. 3. Town planning. Two ex.
Would the children want a strict renaissance plan or a more labyrinth plan? Because of the
movable huts, they can change the plan throughout the years. The children became town
planners and could in a model find out how the town plan might be altered. Thereafter they
could move the huts according to the plan. In the last two years there have been a lot of
different town plans. Here is one of them:
Fig. 4. Another plan
The headmaster for the school said in the newspaper reportage:
We look at this hut town as the most cross subject theme we ever have had. We combine Art
and Craft, Mathematics and a long row other subjects in a practical way. The children learn
to collaborate across the grades. The activities are so varied.
After two months work, one day a week, the invited major of Bergen, could declare this hut
town for opened. Cheap materials make the cost of this “town” a minimum compared to the
permanent, commercial play apparatus, which are hardly used. In this town the school
bought a lot of new material, so the cost where about 60 000 Norwegian Crones, about 9000
dollars. However, this is only half the price of the commercial play apparatus in page 2 in this
paper! In this hut town up to 150 children in 30 groups can play both constructional and roleplay
at the same time!
The school is also one of the members of my project “Creative writing on computers grade
1-4” (Trageton 2001). The 6 year olds had for a long time been playing with all the letters and
produced many pages of letter strings. But now they were also capable of writing a little story
consisting of a few words. Below are some reports from the building process:
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