To study young children is to study the theatre of early childhood, which of course is the narrative of play,’ Vivian Gussin Paley told delegates at a conference in her hometown, Chicago, in 2015, four years before she died at the age of 90. The inspirational kindergarten teacher, who authored 13 books and received numerous awards for her work in promoting the importance of listening to children’s stories, organised her classroom around storytelling.
Few resources are needed to see Paley’s magic come to life: a story table where children can dictate their own stories and a story room rug to act them out. However, storytelling is a natural extension of the fantasies that children act out when they play, and a core collection of fantasy play resources to support this form of expression is vital.
As children play good guys and bad guys, princesses and firefighters and soothe crying babies in the home corner, they learn to envision new roles for themselves and for other people, as well as exploring themes of good and bad, kindness and cruelty and hope and fear.
RIGHT TO FANTASIZE
Paley (1929 to 2019) was born in Chicago and after graduating from the town’s university in 1947, she moved to New Orleans for 12 years, where she trained and worked as a kindergarten teacher and met her husband. She spent 12 years in New York working as a teacher, but it was only after returning to her home town and taking up a position at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools that she started writing about her observations. Her first book published when she was 50.
In Paley’s book A Child's Work, she touches on the extent to which policy-makers in the USA have sidelined fantasy play.
She writes, ‘The children themselves continually reminded us that play was still their most useable context. It was not the monsters they invented that frightened them; it was being told to sit still for long periods of time.’
She continued to be an advocate for children’s right to play up until her final days. ‘Learning starts with a child’s dramatic imagination. Play is the stuff of life. The logical narratives that develop in the doll corner and the block area, in the sandbox and playground, open the door for all future narratives about friendship and work, about family and community.’
HELICOPTER STORIES
After studying Paley’s work and visiting her in America, artistic director Trisha Lee began pioneering the storytelling and storyacting approach in the UK with the Helicopter Stories programme, where children dictate their own stories to adults, who then write them down verbatim before the children gather round to act them out. Paley became patron to Lee’s charity MakeBelieve Arts, under which Helicopter Stories was founded, and their 20-year friendship blossomed.
Lee spoke to Nursery World about keeping Paley’s legacy alive. ‘When I first met Vivian in 1999, I was immediately struck by how non-judgemental she was. At an adult-dominated dinner party, she heard my son speak and made him the centre of the discussion. She listened to children’s voices deeper and harder than anyone I’ve ever met. She believed that the act of kindness was the greatest gift we can give to any child, and I’ve seen first-hand the respect she gave to every child she met.’
IDENTICAL EMOTIONS
Paley’s observations of children’s play led her to consider children’s behaviour and the role of superhero play in their learning. Here, she advises young teachers, ‘Never confuse the fantasy role a child takes and the personality of the child.’
In her (1984) account of superhero play and the doll corner, she describes the differences and the similarities of boys’ and girls’ play, ‘The boys go off looking for Darth Vader with the same sense of wellbeing as two little girls on a picnic. They can yell “Help!” as often as a baby cries “Mommy”, and the dying superhero is given the same gentle concern as the little sister whose kitten is lost in the woods.’
She says that it ‘may be easy to find comfort in the doll corner’, but it’s important to make sense of a style that, ‘after all, belongs to half the population of the classroom’.
RESOURCES
The list of fantasy play resources is wide and varied. It encompasses everything from mud kitchens and potion-making to historic artefacts, puppets and small-world play.
Here, we have listed resources for superheroes and role play, just one of the areas that inspired Paley to write Boys & Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner. Remember, superheroes can be any fictional character with any superpower a child chooses. They don’t need to wear capes or be masked crusaders. They may come in the form of a princess, a witch, a monster or a martial arts expert.
Open-ended resources such as capes, lengths of fabric and junk materials that children can use to make their own weapons or magic wands will go a long way to help them create their fantasy scenarios. Decorated empty cardboard rolls create great superhero cuffs.
- Opt for accessories such as capes or cuffs that provide starting points to stimulate the imagination. Try Cosy’s set of two Plain Capes, £8.25, or its four Glitzy Superhero Capes (pictured, right), £27.99. Use them with Cosy’s set of 6 Superhero Dance Sticks, £10.99.
- Fafu Play’s Imynda range of open-ended resources have been designed to inspire movement and communication in play. Try Bordi Creative Play Dressing Up Ribbon Bracelet Play, £9, or its Silky The Square Scarf, £6, which makes a great cape.
- TTS’s Dress Up Superhero Reversible Capes and Masks, 4pk, £54.99, are great for encouraging communication and storytelling. Or there’s plenty of scope for hero and villain action in Early Excellence’s Role Play Make Believe Resource Collection, £425, and its Red Velvet Cloak, £24.95.
- Provide hats; bags; shawls; cloaks; fabrics such as velvet, muslin, silk, gold lamé; wings; magic wands; a magic carpet; a magic chair; a pot for making spells; bubble mixture, sequins, glitter and coloured water.
- Hope Education’s pack of 5 Occupational Hats Set, £26.99, let children act out the antics of real-life superheroes; or try Early Years Resources’ Storytelling Hats, £24.99, or Early Excellence’s Role Play Occupations Complete Collection 3-7yrs, £355.
CASE STUDY: Helicopter Stories at Oaks Preschool, Chippenham
Three-year-old Lucas would only engage in Helicopter Stories sessions when dinosaurs were involved, Trisha Lee noticed when she attended Oaks Preschool in Chippenham on a fortnightly basis.
‘When I asked Lucas if he wanted to tell me a story, he was reticent at first until he realised that I had no intention of forcing him to join in. As the weeks went by, he moved nearer to the taped-out stage, and when a dinosaur story came up, he shaped his hands into claws and paced around the outside of the stage, taking the widest of strides. When the dinosaur in the story was required to eat something, he bent majestically, opening and closing his mouth to chew.
‘“I loved watching your dinosaur moving around the stage,” I told him. I had won his trust, and soon after he told me his first story. “Dinosaur is big and scary. Dinosaur in a train. A big volcano. T-Rex.”
‘It was his big moment to act out his story and the early years practitioners and I were amazed at how well he co-operated. He chose to be the T-Rex, pacing around the stage with his familiar giant strides and hands shaped like claws, acting alone for the first time. He growled to show us how scary his dinosaur could be. A train of children took the “dinosaur” to the volcano and Lucas told another group of children how he wanted them to enact the volcano exploding, by flying their hands up and down.
‘After that, Lucas became an eager storyteller. As his narrative progressed, he went on to describe features of the dinosaur: its enormity and its huge roar; how it eats meat with its claws and teeth, and eventually, sharing the stage with other dinosaurs. This was a big step for Lucas because as the expert dinosaur, he was not keen to share this role. His final story with me, aged four years and six months, involved a mean, cross T-Rex who bit another dinosaur. He roamed the stage with his face screwed up in rage as the other dinosaurs began to plod around. Lucas opened his mouth as wide as he could and pretended to bite at the air.’
- Following demand, Trisha Lee provides training for practitioners on Helicopter Stories on Demand: £360 for up to four logins. https://bit.ly/3MEhTBp
- She is also the author of Princesses, Dragons and Helicopter Stories, £19, and The Growth of a Storyteller, £15.30, which highlights the positive impact the storytelling and story acting on young children’s literacy, communication and confidence.
