Valdine

I loved doing Exploratory Time and certainly thought I would do it again. But the year seemed to fly by and I never tried it. Instead, what started as a behaviour reward for filling a coin jar turned into an impromptu research all of its own. I called it Play Day. (We had three throughout the year.) It was an entire day of unstructured and unplanned play; their day to do as they chose. We had board games, craft materials, fancy materials for dress up, building materials, a puppet theatre, and all the regular flotsam and jetsam you can find in a typical Grade Two classroom. The only rule was “no Gameboys.” Some children had no trouble filling their time, some wandered about with friends at a loss of what to do, some flitted from activity to activity like little butterflies, and some came to me almost every ten minutes asking what they should do next. In the end, the excitement of the idea of a whole day of play turned out to be more exciting than the actual entire day. And interestingly enough, they did not change drastically from the first to the last. Perhaps because so many people confused the idea of Exploratory Time with play time when we embarked upon our research, I was drawn to try a variation on what we had done. Who knows, perhaps next year I will do both!