Linda's Meta-learning Journal

I spent part of today taking photographs of some children from yr5 dressed up as characters from Hansel and Gretel. I'd dearly love to post some of them here but images of other people's children are really not ok. I might see if I can by obscure their faces and post them. The photos really are delightful.
The interesting thing was that two of the children are quite tough nuts and consider themselves (at 10) too old for playing. However provide them with good costumes, the role play room and a story that they know really well and what happens? Instead of just taking a group photo of the 3 children I end up taking 10 shots of them as they act out the whole story which they do with great attention to detail and once again (like yesterday's reception children) total concentration. So what might have taken 10 minutes took 30 and 3 children and one TA had a 'delightful' time.
So what did I learn?

That 10 years old still need to play.
Well, put like that it seems obvious but easy to forget when they behave like teenagers most of the time.

That it might be worth taking small groups of them into the role play area next year when we re-do this block of work and build this play into it.
I talked this through with my yr5 teacher and she agreed that this would be a valuable addition to the project.

These insights have made me think about how I want to write about informal learning in Report 5. Tom's comment yesterday encouraged me as well. I think I want to write about the way that my play is important for my learning too. It is not just for children. I need to look at this more deeply, to start to formalise my ideas about learning through play and what that means for me as an adult. Not sure where this is going but it it at least going somewhere at last!! Time to look for some literature perhaps?