Wealden Times | WT210 | August 2019 | Restoration & New Build supplement inside

Play & Learn
Education
Our children need to explore and have fun, it’s a key part of
their development, as Hilary Wilce explains...
For all of us, summer is a time of play. Children play
in the long days free from school. Adults play on
the beach, or round the barbecue, or at outdoor
festivals – the year I went to Glastonbury, my first thought
was that this was a vast, colourful playground where
170,000 people were dancing, singing, dressing-up and
pretending just like the children they had all once been.
Play is great. It helps us to develop communication skills.
It aids problem-solving, underpins cognitive
development and feeds the imagination.
But not all of us remember to honour it all
the time. Some of us think that work and
chores are the stuff of adult life, and that
for children the most important thing is
to get top test scores and exam results.
Yet play sits dead-centre of who we
are as human beings. It helps us to relax
and learn, socialise, grow and develop.
Without it, we are poor, stunted, joyless
things who barely deserve the life we’ve been given.
So it goes without saying that play should always
be an important part of school learning. Most of us
understand that little children need to pour water and
dig sand in order to better understand the world and
their place in it. But what about later on? Think back
to your own learning and it’s almost certain that your
most vivid memories will relate to times when you were
“Play sits deadcentre
of who we
are as human
beings. It helps us
relax and learn,
socialise, grow
and develop”
encouraged to do things for yourself and find things out.
If you can’t access any such memories, you must have had
very dull schooldays, but imagine being nine and taken out
into the playground to act out a scale model of the solar
system? Are you ever going to forget being Neptune, at the
far edge of the cluster of planets we call home? Or being 13
and being asked, in a geography lesson, to use sand trays and
water flows to create your own sand dunes and meanders?
Play encourages interest and motivation.
Learning times tables is hard and boring,
but made much more fun when the ‘times
table Macerana’ is used to encourage
counting in twos, fives and 10s.
We are never too old to learn through
play. At the introductory session to an MBA
programme, run by a leading UK business
school, participants were asked to run to one
corner of the room or another, depending on
whether they preferred talking on the phone
or by email. The resulting clusters showed how few people
were genuine extroverts, and how many were naturally more
shy and unconfident. I’m not sure that life’s that simple,
but I’ve never forgotten that visual picture of the prevalence
of human uncertainty underneath our brave facades.
Playing is essential to our co-operative human nature.
We can do it in a million ways – through singing, drama,
sport, painting, cooking – and it will feed and enrich us.
133 wealdentimes.co.uk