Glen Education St Patrick's

Uninterrupted Play

Stephen Zeitlhofer, Early Childhood Educator

I thought I’d take a pretty simple approach to answering the question of “What’s worthy of children’s time” and say that I think one of the things most worthy of their time is their play. It’s an activity essential to the essence of being a child. Much of the day is devoted to giving children meaningful, engaging, and challenging opportunities to play – and that would be the same across all the services. Since play is such a big component of the day in the life of a child, it means we must carefully consider what interruptions to play we allow. Interruptions are a natural part of the day with some occurring necessarily because of routines such as needing to pack away and others occur spontaneously. Nonetheless, this invites the question of how we can ensure that when play is interrupted that we can help support the children to feel that their time and effort was not wasted. We should be able to support children to pick up where they left off so that they can continue to build - literally if they decide to return and continue a piece of work left behind, but also from the perspective of learning so children can continue to build on ideas and skills.  

One thing we have been doing at Glen St Patrick’s this year is creating documentation with the children that encourages them to put as much time and effort into their play as possible. One way we have done this is with our ‘Construction’ portfolio that documents with photos, date, and a brief description, anything the children make with materials or resources. It encourages them to take their time and to explain their ideas because they know that they can ask for their creation to be included in the folder. It encourages continuous learning because children can look through it, see their own creations to return to, and also see what other children have been doing across both Red and Blue groups. It has also helped children to engage positively with transitions and pack-up times during the day. It is also particularly helpful at the end of the day as children know they can get their parents to look at the ‘Construction’ folder and so they can pack away their creation without feeling like they have missed their chance to share their efforts and ideas. The children feel excited when they have finished working on something because they know their efforts have been worthwhile and they know that their play has been worth their time.