I haven’t yet bought the reader so I can’t answer the questions until I get one so I guess I’ll will just give a rundown of what we did and some of my feelings and reflections. I also still can’t log into DSO and download the unit guide so this one will be my best guess of what I should be writing.

Our class started as most week 1 classes normally do with the whole who are we all and what are we going to be doing in this unit. After that Jo briefly about Peter Slade and his book ‘Child Play’ saying that children learn a lot about the world through their play as children. We then were asked to split into smaller groups and talk about the type of play we used to engage in as a child. My group (Zoe and Darcy, I think) all believed that we stopped engaging in play of one form or another at quite a late age somewhere in year 7. Between us we had a multitude of imaginative scenario’s we would play, my experiences tended to be around war, fighting or dangerous scenario’s. This was similar to the other males experience in the group. One thing that I have been thinking about since the class was that my play became more sophisticated as I grew up. From a young age engaging in free play to an older age where the free play was more restrictive following rules more like a game. After this discussion we came together as a whole group to discuss what we had spoken about during this discussion Jo talked about observing a 7 year old engaging in play with a Barbie holding a conversation between two dolls, when she was seen acting in this way by an adult she became self conscious and internalised the dialogue she was previously having externally. Jo said that at about age 7 Slade said children underwent the dawning of seriousness (at least I think it was called that) where they would become aware that it was no longer appropriate to act like they had with play. I’m unsure about this guesstimate age because I defiantly remember playing in that way around adults until i was maybe 10 or something like that but there was defiantly a point when it did become inappropriate to play in this manner. But as with everything in education no child is the same and they will go through stages of development at different rates so this is probably to be expected considering it is more of a guide line.

This discussion led to Jo talking about the educational opportunities available to teacher’s who create a drama about something in their classroom. The example Jo spoke about was a Cafe which allowed for some great learning opportunities such as hygienic food prep, healthy diet, remembering orders, handling money and staff customer relationships. From here we broke up into smaller groups again to plan our own imaginative play area. My group (I have forgotten their names) decided to do a Zoo, initially thinking we could have students participating in the drama as animals we decided against it because we thought the opportunities for learning would be better suited if they did not. Jo suggested that the animals could be represented by posters that the students could research and find pictures of. The animals out of the way we went into a multitude of key roles zoo keepers, food vendors, patrons, zoologist, zoo manager, vets and others. WE then worked on developing some potential dramas/stories and came up with a few, the zoo was running at a loss, a new animal was being brought to the zoo, an animal birth, an infectious disease break out. We ran out of time and dint really get an opportunity to look at the opportunities for learning and other categories but the diagram and layout for designing an imaginative play area was great, I will try and scan it and put it on here when i figure some more stuff out.

So we had a short break and got into creating our own imaginative play area, FertieFree a fertilizer company that makes organic fertiliser’s pesticide and herbicide free. The lesson was taken from ‘Learning through Drama’ which I will be discussing in another post. So as a group we thought about the type of people that might work for FertieFree and then decided of taking on one of those roles and began to play out workers at FertieFree (no discussion straight in). Actually that was after making some still images of positions that our decided worker from FertieFree was taking. After working for a bit a meeting was called and we were told by the head researcher (I think) that because FertieFree was doing so well we were receiving a stock option bonus and that there was a crack in one of the outlet pipes that was not a problem. Not too many people were that excited (Morale was low) so we went back to work. After this we were brought together as a group and introduced to a mussel farmer who lived near the factor, she told her story about mussel farming being a family business for generations and encountering hardships in the 80s due to pollution but overcoming it and now doing quite well for themselves. After meeting the mussel farmer we went back to work and here another meeting was called to say that pollution has been detected by some coastal watch dog and that the maybe FertieFree was to be blamed, this caused much discussion with the blame being thrown around a bit especially at me by someone. This is where we discovered that we had no official ‘Boss’ or top dog to take the fall for what had been done, we also discussed the possibilities of what could be done and the consequences of following these actions such as lay offs, destruction of the coast, a.k.a morale dilemma bogey. At this point the mussel farmer was brought in because she had heard that their may be a leak from FertieFree and to discuss what we knew. This again was a problem because the lack of the ‘boss’ meant we could have no official answer, it also raised the question that the leak might be causing the mussel farmers mussels to be really good and boost their business but on the same hand was this going to end in tragedy with people getting ill and dying.

In the end we came up with no solution but for me the imaginative play brought these problems to the forefront of my thought and I began to question myself and what I believed to be the right course of action, which is what I think the task was designed to do. So I will have to hit up that article in another post but I believe the thing that I brought away from this class was that play allows children to experience things they would not normally be able to in a consequence free environment