Why Play?

“All children, in all places, of all ages like stories and play, can all children be wrong?”

Heart Coherance

What is this?

Research shows that different heart activity patterns have specific effects on emotional and cognitive function. Specifically, the data shows intense stress directly affects your cognitive abilities.

When you are particularly stressed, the heart’s rhythm will be more erratic. This irregular, erratic beating causes the neural signals moving from your heart to your brain to obstruct your higher cognitive functions. This is why we suffer from foggy thinking, poor memory and concentration when we’re under stress.

The way your heart signals your brain during period of high stress also intensifies the emotional effect on your brain.

On the flip side, positive emotions send powerful messages of support from your heart to your brain that encourage cognitive and emotional functioning.

Heart Coherence is essentially when the frequency measures of the brain and heart move in synchronicity, which is the perfect balance to acheive as a human.

When measured in a child totally immersed in their own self directed play, this is what is achieved, coherence.

This goes some way to suggest that we are designed to learn this way, that play is inherent in our being.

connected

The Heart and the Brain have a rhythm and finding that "coherent" state supports improved learning. It should also be noted that these pathways are developed from the womb and programme significantly in the first 100 days of life.

The human heart resonates like a taurus at the exact same frequency as the Earth’s frequency, it’s no accident, it is an earthling. That’s why we often need to to connect with nature to feel better, we are electrically connected to the planet. Grounding theory (see youtube)

We need to use our outside environments with our children and staff a LOT more!

Know our place in the Tribe (people literacy)
Know our ecology on this planet: Even though this is not so important now because we have a supermarket, it is a part of our human development, genetically programmed into our DNA and why we need to grow ECO literacy for our students. Historically, if we didn’t know this information, in terms of living off the land, we would not have survived. We are supposed to “download” the Earth, it is coded into us.

People literacy and ECO literacy go together and they come about through NURTURE and PLAY.

PLAY COMES IN RECOGNISABLE PATTERNS THAT ARE UNIVERSAL REGARDLESS OF CULTURE, ETHNICITY, GENDER OR THE TIME IN HISTORY.

Brain development

"Everything that happens in the brain is preceded by what happens in the “heart” (emotional realm) first".

Pre- birth

The brain is 25% of it’s adult size at birth, we are the only species who has it’s live babies born with a brain so small. All other mammals have a brain of 50% at birth. When the human is born every other organ is up and running except the sex organs which will develop later, but the brain is not developed. The brain is at 50% developed at 9 months so it doubles in that time.

It is preprogrammed genetically into the baby that if you put them on your tummy they will crawl up the tummy to the left breast so that they are over the heart. In the womb the heart is their sound track and they want to be back to the sound of that rhythm. They want this for the first year of their lives!!! Our culture does not do this anymore in baby raising :(

Biological imperatives: these are things that must happen for development, of which play is one.

A culture is a man made thing, it is constructed and each culture has a cultural imperative. Our cultural imperative does not align well in the western world with the Biological imperatives.

85 - 90% brain developed at 3 years. They have been building the hardware up to this stage.

The only countries that start learning abstract concepts like reading and writing before 7 years are only those from the British empire and this started in order to get adults out into the workforce earlier during the industrial revolution.

The above graph shows the different stages of brain development and the brain wave activity.

During DELTA as an adult we cannot be awake. They have only proven that Tibetan monks can achieve this state in an awake state. Babies maintain this state, where there is no judgment etc, they are not even aware of such a thing. Sensory Download capacity at this stage is 4 Billion bits per second!!!!!!! Compared to 2000 bits per second at 10-11 years.

The next frequency at 2 years is called THETA. This stays as a subconscious frequency like DELTA until 7 years and they stay your default settings. This is also a subconscious setting, it is all they can access and are unable to think about their thinking, it is not possible. Metacognition is not possible to at least 15 which is why many countries don’t allow trial in court until 16.

HYPNOGOGIC STATES: These are SUPER FAST sensory download states…

Great book “Glow Kids” by Nicholas Kadarus about children and time on screens, he argues that kids don’t need screens until Year 10 (15 years).

BETA Stage which comes at 10-11years is when we are able to download 2000 bits of sensory information per second.

The point to this information is that what children see in in the DELTA and THETA stage is downloaded at such a significantly high rate, and because it is subconscious, creates norms in thinking and being. Nature created us this way and the formula for success during this time is NURTURE and PLAY.

The first part of our life and brain development is basically designed to allow us to learn all of the nuances that teach us how we get on within our tribe, this can be called people literacy, and it is the most important literacy!!! Sadly this is the literacy that is not happening, due to a range of factors such as screens, dysfunctional home life, non-present parents and so on.

The New Zealand Curriculum is considered world-leading, perhaps only surpassed by Te Whāriki. This is due to these documents (especially Te hāriki) being developed not as an ideology document, but rather a document based on research. It is important that we, as educators keep referring to what we know is best practice based on how a brain functions. Nathan Mikaere-Wallis states that we will get better outcomes for students if we teach them at their cognitive stage, so it is important that we understand a child's brain development and what needs must be met in order for a student to achieve academically.

Brownlee (2017) and Gray (2014) state that play is a vital part of the human evolutionary process. Briggs and Hansen (2012) state that research identifies play is an important/necessary condition for many animals and, from a biological perspective, is important for survival. Craine (2010) argues that humans are no exception to this rule. Gray (2008) states "from an evolutionary perspective, the main purpose of play is education. Play is nature's way of ensuring that young mammals will practice the skills they need for survival. "Play is nature's way of ensuring that young mammals will practice the skills they need for survival."

Dr. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist, psychologist and psychobiologist, has researched the importance of play and where play occurs in the brain. Dr Panksepp stated that "a basic urge to play exists among the young of most mammalian species" and that humans are no exception. He also found that play is important to further develop social skills in adulthood.

Whilst one can easily argue that the purpose of this play is no longer needed, from a survival point of view, many argue (Briggs and Hansen, Brownlee, Grey, Craine) that it is still vital for normal social and emotional development. Cheer and Aiono (2017) state that neurological research now confirms behavioural, biological and developmental research garnered over 30 years ago on the importance of play to healthy childhood development.

If we look at the types of play, sometimes referred to as schemas or urges, we can see a purpose to the type of play that a child is participating in. These urges are a way for children to make sense of the world around them. Aiono (2017) states that the greater the opportunities that children get to play out these urges, the stronger the neuro pathways.

Urges of Play

Gathering - Gathering or collecting items.

Transporting - Transporting can be the urge to carry many things on your hands at one time, in jars, in buckets and baskets, or containers.

Deconstruction - Breaking things comes before making things - for most children.

Construction - Creating and building.

Enclosure - The urge to fill up cups with water, climb into cardboard boxes or kitchen draws, build fences for the animals or to put all the animals inside the circular train track, it is the Enclosure/Container schema. Shelter and safety are deep within the human experience.

Trajectory - The urge to throw, drop and other actions that are all part of the Trajectory schema. Some other Trajectory actions are things like climbing up and jumping off (Trajectory of ones own body), putting your hand under running water (interacting with things that are already moving) and the classic, throwing and dropping (making it happen). It can be diagonal, vertical or horizontal... this is a multi-dimensional urge, after all learning is based on movement in the first years of life.

Connection - Joining train tracks, clicking together pieces of lego, running a string from one thing to another... the urge of Connection. Putting things end to end, tying things together to make a ‘convoy’ of wheelbarrows, trucks, friends.

Enveloping - Putting things into things is an urge, to have a sheet over your head, wrapping things in fabrics or with tape and paper, all actions seen in the Enveloping schema.

Patterning and Ordering - Do you find yourself positioning things neatly into alignment on your desk, ordering the books on the self, getting creative when you plate the dinner or even just tidying-up. Perhaps you see your child lining up their cars, making sure the whale is next to the cow or turning all the cups upside down? It is about sorting, classifying, and seriating.

Role Playing - Children role play to explore their place in society, as well as examine social justice (good versus bad).

Rotation - Anything that goes around anything that is circular - wheels, turning lids, watching the washing machine on spin cycle, drawing circles, spinning around on the spot, being swung around. These are all experiences of the Rotation schema. Starting with rolling when babies learn to move off their backs to spinning round and round and falling down dizzy, children have a pattern of the circular to unfold. Low, horizontal tyre-swings extend this, wheeled vehicles, a spinning wheel, retro wind-up gramophones...

Orientation - The urge to hang upside down, get the view from under the table or on top of the dresser and other actions that are part of the Orientation schema. In order to 'know' what it is like to hang upside down or see things from a different point of view, you must take yourself into those positions. It is looking at things from another angle.

Transformation - The urge to Transform can come in many forms; holding all your food in your mouth for a long time to see what it turns into, mixing your juice with your fish pie, water with dirt, or mixing the bread dough. It's only natural that once you have explored and learnt about a raw material you should want to do further testing. Turning something into something else, watching the properties morph and change: soil and water mud pies, clay and water sculpting, flour, butter, etc.

Climbing - Children are going to climb - some more than others. It is about position yourself to a higher state. Seeing things from a different perspective.

Brownlee argues that a teacher has to look past the content of the play and look at the method. A child gathering and patterning tiger toys is not about his/her love of tigers, rather it is the urge to gather and pattern. She also argues that these urges are biological and in the past helped prepare children for adulthood. The ability to gather, throw, judge distance, follow the social rules of the group, orientate oneself to the desired destination, build shelter, to organise and categorise, etc helped ensure survival and were practiced in childhood.

Types of Play

Reggio Emelia

A short video discussing the Reggio methodology discussing why we play and the link to Neuro science, how the brain forms patterns for learning.

Learning is about experiences. What are our kids going to look back on when they are older, will it be memories of youtube videos, will they remember a a digital life, a life not real?

Culture is created by us agreeing on things. In culture we all agree on things that don’t exist, and then they do. So what is it that we need to agree on as educators, as a society, about what it means to grow and develop healthy people from birth, through school, into adolescence and then adulthood?

In our schools if we get this right...that is if we can truly nurture our tamariki and understand the kind of environments, experiences and contexts that best support deep learning then...

Bullying goes down
Social emotional skills go up
Academic results go up
Happiness goes up for everyone!

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