Practice ResearchSimple 'pizza' making for everyone. Euan instantly took up the role as 'Chef' and we became his 'assistants'. As soon as he felt like he was chef, his leadership skills kicked in. He chose how much ham slices were on each pizza and distributed the cheese and tomato how he wanted it. He'd check on us 'assistants' to make sure we were watching the timer on the ovens so that the pizza would not burn.
He ended being 'chef' whilst tucking into his home-made pizza and made the statement 'If I worked at Dominoes, this is how I'd make the pizza.'. Based on the documentary Secret Life of 4,5,6 year olds, the experts noted that when children enter role-play, it can be them playing out being an adult, which I'm seeing first hand here when Euan became a 'Chef'. He started to talk about how he's imagining himself in the future having a career as a chef for dominoes and stating that this was how he'll make the pizza's. Euan here is 7 years old, a little older than the documentary participants but he's making the same motives of consideration about his adulthood. Practice Research
Due to boredom, Euan takes his initiative to use his imagination and rule-making skills to invent a new game using purely a ball and ourselves. He shows his rules through enacting and performing the positions before initiating the game.
Despite being the inventor of the game and having the power to change the rules, he doesn't try to amend the rules so that he can win. From what I've learnt this could be him exhibiting fairness withing a team environment. I think it's fortunate to have Euan for seeing first-hand approach to a child, in my target audience range, use play to exhibit skills. However I feel that it's a bit biased to look at only one child first-hand as all children are different and inhibit different mind-sets and skills. Although seeing children on the 4,5,6 year old documentary was a good secondary resource, I feel that I need to see other children use an environment to play/learn first hand to see what the documentary may have left/edit out. Practice Research
I wouldn't say that this has restricted his creativity and he was playing with a new set of tools he's never used before. Of course the articles spoke about tablets which are touch screen and don't necessarily come with photoshop, however there is now the Apple Pencil for iPad Pro's which is similar to what Euan was performing here. Whenever Euan has used a tablet or phone, its usually to play. He'll play with the cameras and different snapchat filters, he'll play on different apps that are game-based. He enjoys his video gaming as well. Although he'll enjoy it a bit too much and all of his concentration would be on that, if there isn't one around he'll just play with anything else he can find such as the video posted before of him creating a new ball game. He has a blend of both worlds.
Based on the idea of incorporating digital elements into my work, I wanted to see how Euan was at adapting to new technology. Being born and raised with technology aroudn him, he was able to understand how the hardware and software worked quite quickly just through experimenting and playing with them. However because I know that Euan was raised with access to use technology, I expected him to understand how to use it fairly quickly, whereas this may not be the case for all children. As stated before I think it's important I see how other children behave in certain situations, including any digital interaction.
Research for BothHe spent the whole afternoon in the newly arranged forest school area in his primary junior school. He climbed trees. He said the afternoon was for fun and had free roam, and he played with friends playing chase around the trees. All the children were individual animals based on the first letter of their name, and Euan was an eagle. This led him to pretend to be an eagle at points when playing. Euan could see the circle, at the centre of the forest, when he was in the tree. Three whistles and they had to return to and sit at the circle where there was a fire. The adult demonstrated how to light the fire. They spoke about what they did in the forest and what they liked/enjoyed about it. Then they had to say their name and do their action (Euan was pretend to be an eagle). Euan did a lot of digging as well. He found a root from a tree creating a hole around it. He very, very enjoyed being an eagle, climbing and running around in the mud. He liked running around in the mud because he made everyone else muddy. His class, Year 4, does this once a week every Wednesday until end of year. One thing to say about writing the notes for this topic was that when I asked Euan to explan what he did for my notes, I had to cut out alot of the notes because he said honestly that half of it was lies/made-up. I kind of wish at this moment that I hadn't erased those lies/stories because I believe that's part of his imagination being developed from his experience. He managed to make up new stories based on his personal experience of venturing in the forest location. (I think I can remember him speaking about finding dinosaur bones, I initially thought he meant toy ones, however I think he meant real dinosaur bones - similar to what an archeologist may discover through digging in the dirt).
What I've learnt from visiting Ravens Academy and from Euan's story is that schools efficiently use the technique of repetition. Here the adults/teachers at the end of the day make children speak about their experience, a mode to re-live it but carefully thinking as to why and how to demonstrate this to their peers, expecially through the terms of "playing"/pretending to be an animal of the forest. The natural setting of the forest provided Euan with many opportunities to use it as a "laboratory"; to experiment and find new possibilities, such as seeing the ground from a different perspective in a tree. |
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