Play is the work of the child

“Play is the work of the child.” – Maria Montessori

In our Montessori classroom, we do not use the word “play” and we do not have any “toys”. We have a work period in the mornings when the children take out works from our shelves. Outside, they have some unstructured free time, during which they use what they find in nature to create games and structures. While this language may seem strange to many people, we believe that everything that the child does at our school is their work. We believe that this work is part of their purpose at their stage in life.

The analogy I like to use is a bit deep but one that makes sense for most adults. If you think back to a recent time in your day (or week) when you felt content while doing something, what was it that you were doing? It may be part of your job, part of your hobbies or part of taking care of the young people in your home. I used the word content very intentionally, because I do not mean happy. I mean a peaceful satisfaction that comes from some work that we do. This satisfaction comes from purposeful activity. Now this sounds very big picture and almost spiritual. To give my own example, there are days when I cook a meal from scratch AND everyone eats everything. I know that I have created something that have nourished little bodies today. So, it may be as simple as that. I think that humans are wired to find this purpose and that what our purpose is might change throughout different stages in our life. There may be times when we are trying to find that purpose, in between two jobs or as the children get into a different stage. However, without getting anymore philosophical, isn’t life’s journey trying to find that purpose and sense of satisfaction?

For children, their purpose is a bit more defined for the first few years of life, mainly 0 – 6 years of age. They are wired to learn and practice certain skills that will set them up for the rest of their life. In fact, they are wired in such a way that some of these skills are not possible to learn after 6 years of age. The way a baby learns language is completely different than learning a language at any other point in life. Learning these skills and being in an environment where they can practice these skills is their work. We prepare our environment so that each child’s purpose is met. They are also exposed to new skills so that when the time is right, they can begin to learn them.

Many new families look at our classroom and ask if their child is expected to sit still for so long – maybe after seeing some children do that with some works. My answer is: “No!”. If they want to sit for a long time with a work, they can and they will. But chances are, at some point or another, the skill that the child will be working on is movement. Children this age are learning to move their bodies in new ways and want to practice as much as possible. We recognize this need it the children and have built lessons around it. One of my most favorite lessons is to lay out our color tablets, and then ask a child to go find everything in the room that matches and bring it back to the mat. There are one rule: It cannot be in use by anyone else. A new assistant a few years back was horrified at the “chaos” and the mixing of works that happened. She foresaw the adults having to put everything back after the child was done. However, this particular child loved to walk around the classroom and had trouble sitting in one spot. So guess what? Asking him to walk around the class 20 times was exactly what he wanted! It was his work, and it was hard work and required a lot of concentration on the part of the child. He put everything back where he found it. After we were done, we were tired and ready for snack.

The work by our older children looks different, but it is work. We see our Kindergarteners entering the next plane of development, which is a much more social stage. They want to work together, take turns, come up with plans and learn to compromise on the plans. Just yesterday, a group of 4 Kindergartners were standing near a puddle of water talking about starting a business, selling “spider traps”. They did not like my basic business model question of “Why would anyone buy spider traps?”. But the first order of business was, “Who is going to be the boss?” because “every business has a boss.” As expected, there was some disagreement on this point. But at the end, there were four roles that were decided: the stick collector, the trap builder, the trap tester and the shoe cleaner (one of the four decided to go into another line of work). To a casual observer, they were playing in mud and water. However, I knew that that they were hard at work, planning, executing and learning to work as a team. There were also some engineering skills and laws of physics being tested as well. I only had to step in to make sure their catapult was tested safely!

Next time you realize how tired your child is at the end of the day, remember that they have had a long day of work, be it at school or at home.