MASTERY PLAY
As I reflect on my own memories of play I am often drawn to a single theme - that much of my play took place in and around natural habitats, either in a wood or coppice, a forest, an open moorland, a field, a stream, a river, or, of course, living in Cornwall, a beach.
What often unites these wild spaces, however, is the idea of conquest. I had to conquer each environment as though it was some kind of quest of childhood, a quest that was both expected and 'natural' for someone growing up in a rural area. This idea of conquest is embedded in what is called mastery play, what Hughes suggests is the mastering or control of physical or affective ingredients in an environment.
Mastery play may involve highly skilful judgement and physical control, as would be seen in locomotor play; flexible and adaptable social behaviour, as in social play and other social interactions; finely honed hand/eye co-ordination and dexterity, as in small manipulative play; and experimental behaviour, as in creative or exploratory play.
What is common to them all, however, is Piaget's idea of accommodation and assimilation - meaning that once a child has mastered a way of doing something, they may continue to do so just for the pleasure of it.
Having mastered something, children will show great willingness to display their new repertoire of skills. For example, I once helped an eight-year-old girl to climb a tree, which was an activity she was deeply fearful of, but desperate to do, because her peer group were all doing it.
We spent an entire afternoon exploring methods to make the 'quest' on to the first branch as easy as possible. This involved modifications to equipment that could be used as climbing apparatus, including an upturned dustbin, a length of rope, a step ladder, a rope ladder, a large bucket tied to a rope, other children who were willing to pull the girl up, and even climbing on to my shoulders.
Each attempt demonstrated a growing sense of bravado motivated by pure determination. By the end of that day she conquered that first branch and within a few weeks she was climbing to the top of that tree and shouting her excitement as a display of her new mastered skills.
Like this young girl, I remember making those first tentative reaches for branches that would steal my feet from solid ground. Only recently my partner and I climbed a tree that I had conquered many years ago as a young boy, a tree I remembered as being huge. In adulthood it seemed rather shrunken, but my mastered tree climbing skills were now a little rusty.
When I did manage to get to the top it was still exhilarating.
Mastery play is often considered within an environmental context in the sense that it often involves mastering the elements, such as building and controlling fires, damming streams, making and perfecting paper aeroplanes and building mud huts, or even igloos as I once did for an entire day. But it has its roots in all children's play and perhaps in all human activity.
Children may not master every activity they engage in, either because they are not physically, socially, cognitively, or even spiritually ready, or because both the environment and humans operating within it 'disable' them from doing so or even trying, intentionally or unintentionally.
Like most children's play, mastery play requires sensitive playworkers who can recognise the importance of children controlling or conquering aspects of the environment. This may often mean reassessing how a play environment is resourced. Children will need to be able to make modifications to it, and to explore the impact that their 'mastering' will have on them, others and the environment.
Playworkers also need to delve deeply inwards to think about desensitising risk in children's play environments. They need to search beyond their own fears about allowing risky activities, and they need to enable children to practise skills considered risky so they can master them, thus decreasing the risk.
LOCOMOTOR PLAY
Locomotor play is often associated with games and sports, perhaps because they involve a great deal of physical activity, but this particular play type engages physical activity in all directions and uses a variety of patterns, including climbing, rolling, dancing, sliding, juggling, swinging, and so on.
However, it can be distinguished from activities such as sport in that children normally engage in physical play for the sake of the physical movement rather than for any other purpose or goal. For example, a child running for the sake of running is engaged in physical play, rather than a child running to catch a ball in a game of baseball.
Physical play, then, is conditional to a greater degree on the intentions of the player, being motivated by the action itself rather than the outcome.
Physical play, while needing only the dexterity, strength, co-ordination and kinaesthetic capabilities of the individual, can also benefit from a range of props that are large and small, fixed and loose, and soft and hard.
One of the best play resources I believe a setting can have is a strong length of rope because it can be used in so many ways. For physical play, it has many potential uses other than the typical skipping or swinging.
For example, I used to play a game with some children where I would throw one end of the rope across the floor and they would take it in turns to be pulled 'to safety', the play often being framed within a swamp and monster theme. As this game slowly dwindled away I found that some of the children requested to be pulled around the floor for the sake of being pulled. This was later adapted by one girl who wanted to stand on the edge of steps while hanging on to the rope as I gently lowered her backwards. It was adapted again so that when the rope wasn't available we did the same thing holding hands.
Adventure playgrounds and many natural environments offer the ideal landscape for children's physical play, and while it is challenging to support this play type in environments with no external play areas, with a little imagination and some flexibility anything is possible.
For example, I would often enable the children at an out-of-school club to use pool tables, chairs, tables, cushions and so on for an obstacle course inside the main building, where they would clamber on, under and sometimes in any of these objects. Settees, while having a relaxing purpose, can be a great makeshift trampoline and climbing frame, and if that thought horrifies you then consider getting a secondhand one, as long as it meets fire safety standards.
If converting an environment into an obstacle course is beyond the capacity of your setting, then access to purpose-built equipment should be paramount. This may include objects that can be climbed on, sat on, thrown or bounced, but more importantly, modified by the children to suit their physical play.
For example, at one club we had a tyre on wheels which children could sit upon and push along with their feet. It didn't take long before it was modified with some rope into a pull-along vehicle which, when spun at great speed, would turn up on its side and jettison the rider. This newly modified tyre was very popular for a long time.
Even a simple skateboard can be used ingeniously, as children often demonstrated at one club by stacking up a pile of cardboard boxes and taking it in turns to be pushed along head-first so as to knock the stack of boxes in all directions. I even saw this activity modified when boxes were not available, with large sheets of paper which pairs of children would hold at intervals down the hall, so that the pushed skateboarder would break through as many sheets of paper as possible. The most torn sheets usually denoted the 'champion'. Playworkers were often invited to do the pushing because it offered a greater set-off and a longer run.
Where settings do have access to outdoor environments, and where these can be modified or designed, finance permitting, then ideally a landscape with dips, hills, tunnels, objects and equipment to climb upon will provide for a range of physical play behaviours that enable three-dimensional movement of any number of speeds.
Philip Waters is a lecturer and researcher in playwork, based in Cornwall
Recommended reading:
J Hughes, B (2002) A Playworker's Taxonomy of Play Types, 2nd edn. London: PLAYLINK.
J Hodgson, J and Dyer, A (2003) let you children go back to nature.
Somerset: Capall Bann Publishing.
J Smith, A (1994) Creative outdoor work with young people. Dorset: Russell House Publishing.
