As the first buds of Spring begin to blossom around the campus and the afternoon sun brings a welcome warmth to shake off the winter blues, we see more complex adventures begin to emerge in children’s creative outdoor play. Spring is often the time for more intrepid cubby building, blossoms are collected to add to fairy homes and creeks swollen with Spring showers provide the perfect recipe for mud mixing.
On a recent trip to the kindergarten playground, I was fascinated to watch a small group of children quietly building a home for fairies in the mud. What appeared to the adult eye to be merely sticks poked into the ground and gently scavenged cherry blossoms scattered everywhere, was to these children the beginnings of a series of small houses. As the afternoon grew on, more children joined in the reverie and soon I was invited to the grand opening of a fairy village built from complex joinery, thatched roofs and garden beds. Unbeknownst to these children, similar structures and evidence of imaginative play have also sprung up in the older grade’s playgrounds, such as large-scale cubbies, fairy gardens and intricate road tracks in the sandpit.
The power of imagination, or imaginative thinking, has long been heralded as a cornerstone of Steiner Education in the younger Primary years. Dr Rudolf Steiner talked much about the importance of developing the young child’s inner pictures through storytelling, artistic work, movement, music and speech work. Through the work of the teacher in the early years to nourish the child’s inner world, the children are continually working to bridge the gap between their imaginative life and the instinct for intuition, all the while building their capacity for inspiration in the form of logic and analysis in the later years. Imaginative play not only helps to build one’s inner capacity for imagination, intuition and inspiration, but also develops key social and emotional skills by allowing us to imagine and understand the world through the perspective of others. In short, to put ourselves in the shoes of others helps to develop our sense of compassion, understanding and responsibility for other living creatures and the world around us.
A recent translation of Dr Steiner’s “Foundation of Human Experience” reads:
Enliven imagination,
Stand for truth,
Feel responsibility.
Sharaine Talip
Acting Deputy Principal and Head of Primary School
