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What did I see? Many things, but mostly:
- Children with their disbelief willingly suspended with the tea bags
and cream crackers (pegged out to dry).
- Children with their eyes locked wide and their mouths locked shut
by the eruption of textures, lights, sounds and images, and by the child-sized
tents - built from cardboard tubes or bubble wrap or sack cloth of Beano
comics - and shaped like beach-shelter barriers to the gales of a test-heavy
and creativity-light curriculum.
- Children giggling with awe and unselfconscious delight at the washing-lines
rigged up to tubular bells or wind-chimes - pealing like some benign
and secular belfry, or the stars that sing and the dream tableaux -
small, exquisite, non-nativity scenes composed from dish-scourers, popcorn,
comics and liquorice allsorts.
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- Children cocooned in drapes, parcel-paper walls, low-level ceilings
and high level imaginations, drawn along a journey from a front garden
(via a doormat that answers-back), to a back-shed - a creosoted Zen-zone
- to the tent village, the star-funnel room, the light screen animal
enclosure, the God's eye view
nightscape and dress-your-own clothes-house stand.
What did their teachers see? I hope, at least this:
- That hands-on doesn't mean brains-off.
- That children don't just like playing away - they need to.
- That children see with their fingers and feel with their eyes.
- That when totally absorbed, in a state of flow, boundaries between
different areas of learning become wonderfully blurred.
- That learning is as much about sensing and be-ing as it is about
accumulating facts.
- That surprise is a potent educational tool.
- And that you don't stop playing because you grow old. It's the other
way around.
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