Originally appears in the Winter 2007 issue
The caribou are restless. They sniff and shuffle behind me, waiting for the migration to begin. No, we’re not in the far north. We’re in Vancouver, in the temperate rainforest, and we’re about to embark on an imaginary journey — a seasonal caribou migration.
I love to work with preschool and kindergarten classes. This is because I have the mentality of a five-year-old: I love to pretend. Over nearly a decade of working with kids, I’ve been caught sliding on the ground like a slug and line dancing like a spider building its web. And they pay me to do this.
Why play pretend games when there’s a real world out there with worms and bugs and cedars and streams to explore? Environmental educators have two great resources. One is nature. The other is imagination. When we combine the two, magic happens! So, let’s explore the imagination side of the equation and look at what pretend games offer in environmental education. They:
- Encourage exploration. Put yourself in a centipede’s shoes — all of them! Pretend games connect kids with nature in unexpected ways. Pretending to be another creature can encourage even the most reluctant students to get down and dirty in outdoor explorations. After all, it’s the centipede shuffling through those leaves — not them. Pretending also encourages kids to explore with all of their senses: as centipedes wiggling their way through the forest, kids notice the textures and smells of the ground.
- Engage people. For kids, playing pretend is just plain fun. For teachers, it’s an opportunity to create a mood, build energy, or create calm. Focus attention by leading a visualization exercise; inject energy by having students turn into line-dancing spiders; quiet the mood by having them become seeds slowly growing into flowers.
- Are adaptable. Pretend games are the ultimate in flexibility. Requiring only the imagination, they can be played anywhere, indoors or out. They are as simple or as complex as you choose to make them. They can be highly structured or they can have time built in for free creative play. Props, if you choose to use them, can be very simple or as wild and complex as your own imagination can create.
- Communicate complex ideas. Concepts related to life cycles and seasonal activities, such as migration, can seem complex and abstract to many children. After going through a life cycle themselves — “hatching” from an egg to a chick or “sprouting” from a seed to a plant — children better understand these natural processes. Similarly, students who learn through movement may find that the concept of migration suddenly clicks when they embark on a migration themselves. You can then reinforce this learning by discussing real-life examples.
- Inspire! Pretend games follow students home. One child, after “migrating” several times around a forest path, was distraught that the game was ending…until it was suggested that he could play the same game on his own. The next week, his mother reported that he had been migrating around the perimeter of the house.
Planning play
Here are some frameworks for pretend play that I use in different programs, along with some examples.
What does it feel like to be a …?
Put your students in an animal’s body or a plant’s root system. Becoming an animal or plant helps children empathize with another living thing and feel what its world might be like. Whether your unit focuses on a specific animal or on a plant’s life cycle, putting kids into another organism’s “shoes” connects them to that animal or plant.
Animal senses: Have students use kaleidoscopes to become insects with compound eyes. Go for a walk or a crawl in the forest, insect-style. Or have students seek out a flower for its nectar, using their compound eyes.
Movement: How does a slug walk? How does a hummingbird move? How quickly? Divide the class into pairs, and challenge your students to flap their arms as many times as they can in 10 seconds. Have helpers count how many times each child can flap. Can anyone outdo a Rufous hummingbird at 50 times per second?
Daily life: Animals have different ways of communicating, different family structures, and different methods of construction. Read a story or plan a lesson about an animal’s daily life, and then have students act out part of it to bring the message home. Build a nest in the classroom with paper grass and moss, cardboard twigs, and feathers. Sit down in the nest to read a story about a bird’s early life.
Communication: Honeybees dance to communicate. Learn the various honeybee dances, turn on some bee-utiful music, and buzz around in a line, doing the bee dance. Older students can split into two groups: one group dances to tell the others where the flowers are, and then everyone flies off to search for nectar. To finish the activity, create flowers from wallpaper scraps, place them over cups, and fill the cups with juice. Voilà — nectar for your bees. (The Nova “Tales from the Hive” website has excellent footage of honeybee dances and instructions on how you can do your own dance: see <www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bees/>.)
Construction: Put on some dancing music and ask students to form a line. Go over the moves a spider makes when constructing a web, and then have students dance their way through the motions. With young children, it works best to do this together, since spider webs are quite complex. I line the children up and line dance all the way around the edge of the web. Then we form a circle and dance towards the middle. (Spiderology by Michael Elsohn Ross provides an introduction to spiders and web building.)
Animal families: How does a baby animal find its mother? Divide the class into mother bats and baby bats and ask each pair to create their own unique family squeak. Then have the babies close their eyes, listen for their mother’s squeak, and navigate toward her using echolocation. How do baby birds eat? Divide the class into parent and baby birds, and have the parents head off to find food. When they return, they “regurgitate” the food by squishing it and handing it to the baby.
We will survive
Predator-prey games: Play predator tag. Create an ocean one side of the gym, and challenge a school of salmon to return from the ocean to their stream (the other side of the gym) to spawn. Designate a few students to be hungry seals or fishing boats. The salmon that are caught become predators too, until all the salmon have been eaten. Or ask the students to become moths, hiding as flat as they can beside trees or behind desks, to camouflage themselves from the teacher, who becomes a hungry bird. For younger students, limit the complexity of the predator-prey interactions, and be sure to provide an opportunity for them to participate even after they have been caught. These activities give students a taste of the challenges that animals face in the wild. Survival activities are favorites for indoors or out: be prepared to play them again and again, or limit the time by playing them just before recess or lunch.
Searching games: Have students become birds and search for twigs to make into a nest. Or become ladybugs, searching for pompom “aphids” hidden in the classroom. What survival skills do these animals need?
Survival tactics: Create a beach using shells, giant pillowcases for rocks, and boxes for logs. Ask students, Who are the major predators and prey on a sandy beach? (Birds and invertebrates.) Have the children become clams and practice getting away from predators by pushing themselves through the sand with a muscular foot. Then, as the leader, become a bird searching the beach for clams. The clams must dig themselves under the rocks and hide so that you don’t eat them.
Circles of life
Seasonal cycles: Animals and plants change with the seasons, and these seasonal cycles can be complex. Visualization helps children understand natural cycles. By walking (or slithering) through a plant or an animal’s year, they have an opportunity to take part in that cycle for a moment. Have students become leaves sprouting on a tree in the spring, eating sunlight; then have them shake themselves off the tree in an autumn wind and swirl around in the breeze.
Life cycles: Ask students to imagine themselves as slugs, hatching from eggs and licking their way through a mushroom. Or have them become chicks, pecking their way out of their eggs and fluffing their wings. Life-cycle activities are quiet, absorbing ways for children to learn how animals grow. Accompany them with real-life examples — bring butterflies into the classroom or grow salmon from eggs — and you have a recipe for real understanding.
Migration: Nothing burns off some early morning energy like a good migration. Have the students become caribou, using noisemakers to simulate the clacking of their heels as they move through the Arctic. Have them sniff the air for predators, swim across a river, and seek out snow to avoid flies. Finally, have them work as a group to figure out how to get back home again. Did we cross this river before? Did we see this rotten log? Did we smell this skunk cabbage? (Caution: be prepared to migrate more than once!)
Stocking your cupboards
Over the years, my office has become a bit of a mess. I have snowflakes in my filing cabinet, truffles in my cupboards, and giant flowers leaning against the wall. I’m a packrat, and I save the props from each program so that I can use them again and again. Of course, some of the best props are found in the great outdoors — trees to hide behind, or local landmarks that can become signposts during a long migration — but a great many props can be constructed using simple materials. All that’s required is a liberal dose of imagination from both teacher and student.
Here are some props to hang your imagination on. There’s nothing fancy in the list. Rather, they are made of simple, inexpensive household items; and since none of us has too much time on our hands, they are things that can be used again and again. When you have a personal stash of props like these, you’re ready to pretend to be just about anything.
Foam pellets: These are dandies to pick up, but they make great snow. Or place them inside a pretend mountain, reverse a vacuum hose, and watch the volcano erupt.
Long strands of cloth: Hang strands of cloth from the ceiling to make jungle vines and kelp forests, or use them as long strands of grass when you build a nest.
Fabric and wallpaper samples: Multicolored scraps of fabric and wallpaper can become flowers, pollen grains, aphids, or camouflaged invertebrates.
Rope: Rope can become a spider’s web or a frog’s tongue. Or have students keep together by hanging onto a rope during a group migration or other group movement activity.
Ice cream or margarine containers: Plastic food containers can become the mouths of animals or collection pouches for animals that gather pollen or aphids. A large ice cream container is excellent for storing paper leaves or snowflakes, ready to be tipped onto an unsuspecting group!
Corrugated cardboard: Ah, the cardboard box, long beloved by parents as the best and least expensive child’s toy. Roll thin cardboard into tubes to make trees or stumps. Chop it into strips and it becomes twigs for nests and sticks for beaver dams. Large flat pieces make giant flowers and leaves. Huge boxes can become ships, submarines, tunnels, and houses.
Blankets: Blankets make excellent hiding places. Drape them over a box to make a tunnel or a cave. Have students hide under a gray blanket of sand or a blue blanket of water. Place blankets on the floor to make a cozy nest.
Pillowcases: Filled with cloth, pillowcases become giant eggs, or rocks on a beach. Kids who are playing snakes can sit inside one and make it their skin. Smaller children may be able to curl up into a pillowcase and then emerge from their “egg.”
Jar lids: Tie jar lids together with string to make a noisemaker, or add a spoon for banging.
Shredded paper: Shredded paper makes great nest material and is good for hiding things.
A few objects are so useful that they are worth paying for. These are:
Kaleidoscopes: When you want students to become insects, kaleidoscopes make fabulous compound eyes.
Tent: Looking for a sturdy cave or undersea experience? Try decorating the inside of a tent and have students crawl into another world.
Masking tape: Masking tape is wonderful for marking out dance steps or building patterns on the floor. And it’s easy to remove later.
Finally, you might consider making a few objects. These don’t take a lot of work, and they can be used again and again:
Papier-mâché eggs: Cover a balloon or other container with papier-mâché, and it becomes a giant egg or seed. You can cut it down the center so that it “cracks” open.
Laminated leaves: A stash of laminated paper leaves, in both spring and fall colors, can be used and reused for a variety of purposes: students can hide in them, or use them for building animal homes or as “food” for decomposers such as slugs.
Paper snowflakes: Paper snowflakes add atmosphere to winter migrations and they’re fun to slide in and to dump on others.
Pretend play with “older” folks
A couple of years ago, I attended a workshop by nature educator Joseph Cornell in which we became trees and he was a nasty tree-boring bug. With no props at all, he had us all giggling hysterically. Pretend games such as these help to drop boundaries. They make it okay to be silly, to make noise, to run around, or to sit in quiet contemplation. Despite the somewhat serious facades of older children, teenagers, and adults, most find pretend play to be fun and engaging. It just takes a little convincing sometimes, especially with those who are uncomfortable in new groups or uneasy with pretend activities. How, then, can we engage older students in pretend play? Here are few guidelines:
- Break the ice first. Initiate pretend activities at a time when everyone is open to them. If you have a group for a few days, wait until the group has gelled and everyone feels comfortable.
- Act when the mood is right. After participants have gotten to know each other a bit, you might introduce an active pretend activity, such as a bee dance. Near the end of the day, when people are feeling more reflective, ask participants to become an animal or a plant and to use their senses and imagination to visualize a moment in that organism’s life.
- Have an active “out” for anyone who is uncomfortable with the activity. Perhaps the student can be an observer and reporter, or form a perimeter for a chasing game, or act as a guide or guardian for a herd of caribou. Having participated in this way, the student may be inspired to join in next time.
So why not turn into a slug this winter or sprout like a leaf next spring? I wish you many happy hours of pretending, this year and beyond.
Resources
Cornell, Joseph. Sharing the Joy of Nature. Dawn Publications, 1989
Cornell, Joseph. Sharing Nature with Children. Dawn Publications, 1984.
Petrash, Carol. Earthways: Simple Environmental Activities for Young Children. Monarch Books, 2002 (easy guided activities and crafts for the preschool and kindergarten age).
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Tricia Edgar coordinates education programs at the Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre in North Vancouver, British Columbia.