Welcome back to school after this unique long weekend, allowing us all to pay our respects to Her Majesty and commemorate Her reign, while marking the final day of the period of national mourning. I have copied below the message of condolence that our Head Boy and Head Girl wrote on behalf of Edge Grove and read out in our whole school commemoration service last week. It's a touching tribute to a wonderful woman who will forever be in our hearts and minds.
A daily source of great joy for me as an educator of long standing has been to find time to observe and engage with the children when they are in a relaxed and so more naturally engaging outdoor setting. I’m referring to break and general play times and to the keenly anticipated co or extracurricular sessions that are on offer at schools like Edge Grove.
These important learning enrichment times are quite often unstructured and so provide for an unfettered freedom that is vital in serving to add dimension and delight to a child’s holistic learning experience. Along with the obvious physical benefits, studies show that a child’s cognitive, social, mental and emotional development are subtly but significantly enriched each day through play. Growth opportunities that bring them alive in ways that serve as an important augmentation to the more structured and formal classroom learning.
To quote Fred Rogers, “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning.”
In an age when the influences and impact of technology are all too often robbing boys and girls of their childhood (a much bigger topic for another newsletter, perhaps), we owe it to our children, in this ‘sponge-like’ stage of their lives, to make sure that time to play, in whatever form or format, is preserved, protected and encouraged.
Here are three snapshot cameos that I observed last week and that I felt are worth sharing with the Edge Grove family.
1. A late morning visit to our Edge Grove Pre-School was perhaps the highlight. I arrived at this well-appointed facility at a time in the late morning when all thirty-six precious three year olds were enjoying a variety of freedom-to-learn-from-play adventures. Their dedicated teachers gently guided, corrected and encouraged them through a range of appropriately child-centred play activities.
2. Watching at a distance from my office window I noticed two young girls from Lower Prep making the most of their break time by sharing their cartwheeling expertise. What was lovely to see was how the one, more proficient at the skills of cartwheeling, took time to tutor and encourage her friend on a few of the finer points. There was plenty of laughter and carefree happiness being experienced by both girls.
3. It was a special joy to join Ed Balfour and to briefly attend a few of the Edge Grove House hockey and football matches on Wednesday afternoon. On a beautiful, sun-drenched day, a good number of Year 5, 6, 7 and 8 girls and boys, enthusiastically representing their respective houses, happily competed in some well-contested games. Camaraderie, team spirit, energy and loads of fun, were the order of the afternoon’s play.
In his timeless classic, 'All I really need to know, I learnt in kindergarten', Robert Fulghum explores the profound insight associated with finding for our children learning-for-life play time opportunities that will serve as sound and simple but vital preparation-for-life lessons. These are a few of his more salient observations:
“All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at primary school. These are the things I learned:
Share everything; play fair; don’t hit people; put things back where you found them; clean up your own mess; don’t take things that aren’t yours; say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody; when you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm.
We are sent to school to be civilised—to be introduced to the essential machinery of human society. Early on in our lives we are sent out of the home into the world. To school. We have no choice in this. Society judges it so important that we be educated that we must go. It is the law. And when we get to school we are taught the fundamentals on which civilization rests.
From the first day we are told in words we can handle what has come to be prized as the foundation of community and culture. Though the teacher may call these first lessons “simple rules,” they are in fact the distillation of all the hard-won, field-tested working standards of the human enterprise.
Through the playing of games and sport, children learn how to win honourably, lose gracefully, respect authority, work with others, manage their time and stay out of trouble.”
I am thrilled to see that here at Edge Grove, quality time is set aside each day for the children to play, interact naturally and to socialise with each other in these beautiful outdoor spaces. Alongside some obvious sporting skills, many of the softer skills that our children will need to become relational, kind, compassionate and empathic adults one day will be forged through their exposure to and participation in much that play, games and sport will bring their way.
A Final Word on this subject from Sir Ken Robinson:
Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.
I hope to see many of you at the FoEG Welcome Evening this Friday 23rd September at 7.00pm in the Apthorp Hall. Best wishes and warm regards,
Richard Stanley Interim Headmaster
