Play Workers

It is a Monday morning in mid-November, one of those mornings when the whole nursery school seems to vibrate with the children's enthusiasm and fun.

The buzz in one room is partly accounted for by a group of four children (aged three years to three years and six months) who are waiting for a practitioner to join them for a group activity. They are giggling, bouncing and chanting repeatedly:
'Diwali, Diwali,
Bob Marley, Bob Marley.'
One of the children catches my eye and comments delightedly, 'That's funny!'
A brief chat with the practitioners confirms that this is a totally spontaneous invention by the children and the curriculum can only claim credit for some recent preparations for the festival of Diwali. However, it is obvious that enjoyable work on rhyming sounds and play with language had enabled these children in their first term in nursery school to combine fascinating new words from the curriculum with their out-of-school words and culture, in order to create a living poem. The children's body language, playfulness and comments signalled quite clearly that they were experimenting with the sounds of language, rather than its informative functions.