Outside the box, my favourite place. Whether that box be a screen, a building, a life style or an idea, that’s where I believe creativity exists. Anyone who is of the belief that play and learning cannot coexist….. read on MacDuff!
“We like to get dirty,” the boy’s teacher, Lorrie Clendenin, says, smiling. “We like to explore. The parents know that we are all coming home messy. We dig. We take hikes when it rains and snows. We’re always out.”
The suburbs—once marketed as bucolic and expansive escapes from the confines, ills and dangers of the city—are now developed in ways that sharply limit open land where children can play and explore.
Parents who grew up roaming freely in the neighbourhoods of their youth are often afraid to let their children do the same. Schools pressured to reduce budgets and raise test scores cut recess and physical education. Teachers assign ever more homework, effectively tethering children indoors after school.
Jane Clark, a University of Maryland professor of kinesiology, coined a phrase to describe today’s physically constricted youths: She calls them “containerized kids.”
There is a nascent movement to free containerized kids to spend more time exploring the natural world….. although nursery schools designed around teaching children outdoors are relatively rare nationwide.
Watching these preschoolers, it’s easy to believe that even in modern-day suburbia, an evolutionary memory of roaming the land is hardwired into our brains—and we deny it at our peril.’