Our Play Inquiry Begins!

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Our new Inquiry begins with a provocation of PLAY! The students had an opportunity to explore play and reflect on play on the first day of term 3.  This provided the teachers with a student voice  about the benefits and outcomes of play.

The students were very engaged, although for some this idea of play was challenging, making a decision as a group about what to play and how the game was going to work was fascinating interaction to witness. PLAY has huge learning possibilities! I am looking forward to all the learning opportunities available when our Inquiry unit is constructed on Monday.

Our Play inquiry has been up and running for a good couple of weeks and its possibilities and links to the curriculum are endless. We have created PLAY gremlins who come out when people don’t follow the rules that make us happy, we have planned, constructed and taught a game for each student and shared this with older students to receive feedback (some students managed to change the game if it wasn’t working, developing their analytical skills) and we are still learning.

Writing instructions has been a learning curve; we had to begin with games that we had in the classroom (ones that never come out) and read the instructions, identifying the main concepts and understandings, then play the games. We had to listen to others explain how to play a game and initiate the game according to the rules. Very challenging, we had some games from the 70’s that used very different language to our current language, it was a great talking point.

Luckily we were able to incorporate Play into our language unit (French), the students have learnt how to play Petanque.

Next stop old games and how they spread around the world! Not to mention student similes on play.