 Welcome to Pookie Ponders, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. I'm Pookie Nightsmith and I'm your host. Today's question is how can we let go of our adultness and play and I'm in conversation with Greg Botrell. My name is Greg Botrell and I'm the author of two education books called Can I Go and Play Now and the other one's called School and the Magic of Children that just came out in April and I'm also the creator of the YouTube series which is called PlaySchoolTV and all of those things explore play which is what I'm incredibly passionate about. That's my life in a nutshell. So it's all about play. Why is play so important to you Greg? Well I used to be an early years leader and assistant head teacher in a primary school and I was lucky enough before I went into training in education to go out to Reggio Emilia out in Italy and out there they have a sort of education system that really values children and it was a real eye-opener when I went it kind of coincided with the birth of my daughter and I just slowly began to see that children had something about them that they were magic and I hope every parent believes their children are magic and I would also hope that every educator believes children are magic and it kind of I don't know I saw it as it opened the door because I do believe play is like a door that you have to step through and once you've stepped through it you never want to go back. Tell me more about that so what happens when you step through that door? Through the door? Well you realise that children are trying to tell you something. They're trying to show you something. They're trying to show you how to live. They're trying to remind you of your own childhood. I'm a great believer that our our identity is born within our childhoods and unfortunately education systems in the Western world, much of the Western world, deny us who we really are. They take away our creativity. I greatly believe that children are born mathematical and the system because it is a system and takes that away from us and I've said you know and I think you know if you've got your own children most parents would see that our experiences, our own experiences of school, I think if we held a straw poll and we asked adults who's good at maths most adults would say that they're not but that was what they were taught by school and so I'm really just interested in how play and more specifically how childhood can come alive within our education systems because I believe it absolutely can, especially with in early years or in early childhood as I prefer to call it. So yeah that's kind of that's my my greatest passion is trying to show that play it's not just about, it's not trivial, it's not fun even though it is, it's something far deeper and richer than that. And so am I understanding correctly then that you kind of feel that this is something that we're born kind of able to do but we kind of unlearn it over time. Absolutely. I'm an adult who's not very good at play I'd like to be better. So what do I do? I need to copy children or I mean how does that? In a way, in a way it is kind of like that we are you know we as adults we kind of sort of centre around the idea that we are the ego and we're the controllers of learning and we're the controllers of children but children are actually they're full of ideas and wonder and maybe in our own childhoods maybe we didn't have the opportunity to have that wonder maybe we had to learn it for ourselves over time you know not everybody has a great childhood I accept that but children are trying to remind us of what life can actually be and I often talk about looking for life in the small corners of the world. Children they just see things differently to us and it all comes down to this idea of the cardboard box how children see a cardboard box. Me as an adult I see it as something really frustrating that I've got to break up and recycle it becomes something impractical whereas a child will see the infinite opportunity and potential within that box so it's something I call the seventh sense all children have it to a degree they see through the objective reality that we think the world is and they see the potential the infinite potential in everything so that's why things like a wooden block are really really important for children because the wooden block can be anything they can interpret it with their seventh sense to become anything so in terms of the toys that we choose for children it's really good to try as best as we can to try and choose toys that are open-ended so that children can interpret them and then as parents and as teachers because the teacher and the parent are they're both teachers going back to the Reggio Emilia where I went to it out in Italy they believe the first teacher is the parent the second teacher is the child is the teacher and the third teacher is the environment and the teacher and the parent are kind of like the electrons going around the child and it's about listening okay often our education systems were very quick to tell children to deliver because what we have is we have a system whereby we want to test children to prove the value of the education system so all of this is adult world stuff it's just the adult world trying to prove to the adult world but it can do its job but what happens is children and childhood gets put to one side and a classic example of that is today the government of announced that the phonics screening test is going to become back in for year one children in the autumn term so we've been through all of this coronavirus upheaval children yes children are resilient but many will be coming back frightened many will be coming back with great mental need ultimately what play holds for them but the government department of education have decided that the children need a phonics screening test and to me it tells me where we value children in in this country that we don't we don't value childhood and it's that thing of with parents is trying to show parents that we need to we need to value children it's not just children parents go to work and children go to school and it doesn't matter what children do it matters hugely hugely even more so now I would argue and you know knowing knowing your work I would hope you would you know I reckon you would agree with me absolutely I think that kind of yeah play and nurture and creativity feel like the most important things for me right now what do you think the children should be doing instead of a phonics screening test and all the preps that that would mean well it certainly doesn't need to be done in the autumn term when children come back that's not the thing that they come from that need to be confronted with it needs time and unfortunately that's something that the adult world can't seem to give children children need time that's what parents need to give children is time time to be time to be around time to be to listen to chat to explore together the the kind of sort of pedagogy that I talk about in my in my two books is about this idea of co-play the adult and the child play together so the adult kind of steps down and allows the child space and time to wonder and to question and the adult questions and wonders together so as rather than the adult the child has to get up to the adult world the it's almost it's more of a collaborative cooperative approach because ultimately what play does because it's in your DNA and it's in my DNA it's in everyone's in our bloodstream play it's how we make sense of the world you can't no matter what the adult world does they will never take play that's its strength they'll never take play out of children's DNA ever they can't no matter what tests they put in they'll never take it away so the idea is that play is a gift to us so if we go into play if we open up that magic door and go into the world of play as a co-player as an adventurer then we can sprinkle skills over the top of children we can do reading and writing and mathematics but we do it through their play and so it's just a it flips the way that we see education where the child has to know where the where the adult's up here the controller of learning whereas ultimately it's about letting go of that control and allowing children freedom and choice because it's the freedom and choice that make that make who we are so how do you become an effective co-player if you're perhaps used to a slightly more rigid routine maybe you're a teacher who gets how to prepare a child for a phonics test and you know you you're in that system how would you step out of that and become a co-player well it's hard it's not easy it's not easy because the system as it stands isn't about co-play it's about the delivery of knowledge and it's about children being compliant to the teacher it always frustrates me when the bbc put photographs online of classrooms and they always put a photo of children behind a desk because it just reconfirms this idea that learning only happens at a desk but it doesn't children aren't programmed to be set behind a desk um there's you know the the children need to be active they need to be outside they need to be able to explore but it needs i mean i talk about teaching from the soul and that's what we need and that's really hard because it challenges everything the way i was brought up to be a teacher i was taught to be in control of children when it wasn't until i the door swung open and i stepped through that i saw that my control was actually holding them back what i was doing is i was diminishing who they could be i was shaping them just to pass a test but the test isn't who they are and we want and by by the way saying that we don't i don't you know about testing children it's not to say that we don't want to give them skills yeah we absolutely do want to give them skills but we want to give skills as a gift not as something that they have to do so writing is something you have to do you know writing is a really incredible gift isn't it it's the most amazing thing that you can make marks and someone else can interpret it yeah and either understand i mean you know or not understand you know if you write on twitter whether you understand or not understand but it's about showing children that play extends into language you can play with words but you can't do that if it's just you teach phonics so it passes a test that's just it's dead you're just teaching dead language to children because all they're doing is doing it to be compliant to pass the past and that's not a criticism of teachers at all it's a criticism of the adult world yeah that demands this from children and you know to me you know reading again like reading i mean what a gift that is to give to children to be you know if we looked at your bookcase now and we you know we went to the orange shelf and we opened up the book and we could take something that someone has taken out of their brain and put on a piece of paper what a gift to give children and yet what we do is we create these systems like book ban books yeah which if you've got your own children are the most dullest thing in the world you know i can't you know because teachers don't read book ban books to children at the end of the day why don't they because they know they're boring so we say to children well you can have that book ban book and this really beautiful book like the giant jam sandwich or whatever book it might be this is the real stuff you have this fake stuff so we're just giving you know when we do that we've got a system that's telling children that reading is quite boring but it isn't it's the most amazing thing i would hope and judging by the number of books on your bookcase i can see you're in colour order i love them all what teaching from the soul sounds like quite a bold and brave thing to do tell me more about what would that look like like take me into you know one of your classrooms say because particularly teachings from the soul is about the connection that you have with the children in front of you so it's about going into the children's play to understand who they are so children not only have got magic my belief is that they've also got a mystery they're telling you about childhood and they're telling you about themselves they're telling you how they interpret the world and how they're interpreting themselves within the world so it's our job to make time and space to go into that to go and learn from children so again it's this kind of flip if you like and ultimately what i'm not then doing is just taking a teaching scheme or a topic and saying i think this will do or i'd taught this last year so i'll do it again that's not teaching from the soul teaching from the soul comes right from here because it's almost like if you didn't do it then the world of i talk about the world of good things we want the world of good things for children don't we i think we do i think children deserve it they deserve adventure they deserve magic they don't deserve just tired kind of just regurgitation of stuff and to me the only way to teach in the soul is through play and those i talk about play and not play so there's play which is where children are choosing for themselves and they are playing with whoever they wish to play with in and they are interpreting the world and then there's not play they're the moments where i call them to me to teach them a particular skill that i know that play can't quite do as in if i'm going to teach phonics for example i wouldn't necessarily just stand in the middle of the room showing you know 30 children flashcards because hey they're not going to look and also you know the richness of their plays far better but then i do a bit of not play a bit like coming to a base camp and saying on the adventure right this for this next bit we're going to need these skills and i talk about tight teach so that's like a tight teach of not play and then into open play so the two work together okay so like to co-play is is like you go into play and then at moments children come to you as well but they only come to you because at that moment you've got something magic to show them whether it be a story whether it be something to do with phonics whether it's you know something amazing about number um and all the time in the play what we do is if we're co-playing we're just popping up skills all the time because play doesn't recognize a curriculum there is no curriculum in play you can take learning anywhere literally anywhere so how do you plan though i mean don't you can't you can't plan play you can't plan for the children you but you can plan for you so for example if i know children are struggling with a certain thing i plan what they need in terms of the skill so then i'm looking at what they're doing within their play as to how i can sprinkle it over the top but they're not defined by that next skill i will just see where the play will will will take them so the traditional model of teaching is you plan for the children yeah but this model is you plan for yourself because if we accept that play is choice i don't know what you're going to do and that's the biggest thing that stops co-play is the biggest inhibitor for teachers who won't play because they've got to let go of control yeah and we're raised in control so it's like you you have to then but you do get the control back in a way because you're planning for yourself you you know what you're going to do but you don't know what the children are going to do oh i feel a bit as you're just thinking about it but that's but that's it's huge it's it's a really big way of it takes it takes faith in children massively um and we mustn't forget it's not just the children don't just come in and play all day some some places do that in my version of co-play there are those moments when children do come to you because i want to open up some kind of magical gift to them whether it be a new mascot or or what have you but children will then be operating within the room in the play that i have created for them like i called it like a learning landscape that they're gonna go in they're gonna have an adventure and you know what i'm coming with you and we're gonna go and explore this together and it can be it can be really it can be really difficult for teachers to do the main thing is is it's about childhood and when does it end when does childhood end to me it doesn't end at five it doesn't end at six or seven or eight nine i don't know what you know i personally said it's 18 and part of childhood to my mind is that children need choice and they need to be able to collaborate not be sat at red table green table blue table yellow table and be defined by their ability because play doesn't see ability yeah do all children come with the kind of the skills and the understanding and the confidence to play well or are there things that you need to teach and establish to yeah there's certainly you have to have what i call play parameters you have to have rules um use you know it's not a free-for-all and again part of the difficulty of play because it's freedom the difficulty that the adult world has with play is that they haven't set it up and they haven't controlled it so they worry about what's going to happen yeah um and that's perfectly natural um and sometimes it can feel it can seem like you don't know what's going on but the children do because it's their play yeah and that's where when you go into it as a co-player you begin to understand the mystery of what's what's going on around you um something that will be uh you you need to have those play parameters in place but you agree them with the children not don't do this that's just control or if you do this i'll give you a sticker so again this whole idea of just rewards for children yeah creates the culture where children are doing it so that you are pleased with them but that's a false morality to my mind it has to be i don't do this because i believe i shouldn't do it not so not because the teacher is going to reward me with star of the week or whatever it might be so it's trying to because children are really capable of negotiating their own parameters what kind of parameters are we talking about so we might talk about say um how we might use a how we might use water because obviously some children may think it's a great lark to throw it at each other yeah but the idea being is if you're doing that you're stopping other children from learning it's about trying to show children that the recognizing their value of their play because the adult world often talks about you work and then you play when they go through school you have a lesson and then you get your play time the playtime is the reward but play is the reward in itself so things like i used to do things like i used to pinky promise with my children so we'd get them all together and we'd make a pinky promise about how we were going to use resources so it became like a negotiation as to we all agree this is what we're all agreeing on if we're going to be inside we're going to walk why should we walk well if we're running we're going to knock someone over and then we're going to hurt someone so there's a there's a sort of a moral framework that we're working in rather than the adults going don't run yeah we're doing it more in a positive way walk because if we walk children have got the opportunity to learn in the same way as tidy up time yeah it's about saying to the children if we don't tidy up after we finish playing the next children that come they can't learn because we've just left it as a mess and what we do is we do it together so i am i as the adult i also join in too i don't just stand at the room commanding children to tidy up we do it together it's the idea of like let's let us do it together so that the children see that i'm no different to them i'm not above them i'm taller but i'm not you know and i've got a bit more knowledge of course i've got a big gray beard and a bald head they don't have but the idea is that we're working as a team we're a community yeah and it can be really really powerful and do you have kind of particular sort of activities or kind of go to modes of play that tend to kind of work better or is it very free flowing it can be very free flowing um i often again a lot depends on the the key to it all is is the landscape that you set up the resources that you enable children to to interact with yeah there's a big long list of things um that the children you know really love and the idea is is that we're always interrogating and asking what we put out what skills it's got within it how children use it yeah because the moment we start doing that so we see how children interpret certain objects what it does is it gives us an idea of how other children will do it as well yeah so children are kind of passing their gift to you which you then pass on to other children that weren't there in that particular moment and children will latch on to it more because it's come from the world of children not from the world of adults because actually children do listen to children from more than they listen to adults but they really do that they really do they learn more from children probably than they do from the adults so if children are learning through playing and your classroom is a place of of play then what happens at playtime you don't have them you don't need them we just used to just go on through okay because because playtime is there as the break for children to run around but if you have a play culture as I call it your play culture enables children to choose to go outside because outside has equal value to inside the learning will follow them maths and writing reading all those things will follow them because it's in them in here so rather than it being we've done our work and we go outside the children are and again so it's a different way of working you have to forego your cup of tea playtime on your quick chat in the staff room but what it gives I talk about a play sandwich okay play sandwiches where you do like a bit of not play carpet time first thing it might be some storytelling or something and then you have a big chunk of play and then the other bit of bread is a session of phonics at the end or some maths or whatever it might be so you've given that really big chunk of time in the middle because it's that bit in the middle that's going to be the most exciting part no matter how brilliant your carpet time is the excitement is in the middle because children are now playing and they're showing you the world and they're showing you who they are and do you find that other people that you work with get on board with this and come along or is it a bit trickier to get some adults to join in? it's a process it's it's as I see if you're going to go on an adventure which I believe play is then we have to accept that some people are not as far on in the adventure as you are that doesn't make them less of a person it doesn't make them a weak practitioner it doesn't it just means that those who are further on in the journey feel it and have learned more if you like and it's their job to enable the people who are less so to follow but what it takes is great honesty great you have to be in this way of working you absolutely have to be honest with your shortcomings to share them as a team why well because if you don't like playing outside for example you will put in as an adult you will put in a million different reasons why you don't like why you don't like outdoor play but ultimately the reason might be just you feel the cold so you and we're great at that aren't we put all the masks up all the personas that's that's what we do really brilliantly we're really good at that and we make we build all the barriers up but with co-play you have to be absolutely really honest with yourself about your practice and even those who are further down on adventure they still have to be honest with themselves and they have to reflect on who they are because this this is about i believe it's about becoming a really authentic educator because you're teaching right out of here and where are your shortcomings where are my shortcomings i've got it's probably a lot that's my friends well um one of my shortcomings probably in that often i have been in certain areas and i've not valued them so for example i was talking i have a i have a like a mentoring group and we were talking yesterday about how sand i used to find sand really difficult to play in as a resource um i i really don't like the texture of it um there's something about it so i used to find it really hard to go in and play in there and i didn't value it as much but actually what it took was was the honesty to talk with my team and say look do you know what guys i'm struggling with this what do you do how can we how can i overcome this yeah and so we put in things and i was a leader and you know so i allowed my team to kind of reflect with me and go okay let's put these things in place and lo and behold what did i discover the magic of sand i really yeah now it's one of my favorite places to go but it's i i could have carried on putting up the barriers couldn't i all the time but unless you're honest then you know as an educator you know goes back to you were saying you know about this idea of letting go and playing tons of people will be really opposed to that but ultimately it's about fear of letting go that's what we're afraid of why do you think we're afraid of that because we're raised to be in control we're told it you know i was when i and by the way i'm not criticizing teachers here really really not it's just it just it's just a different way of educating which is hopefully i would like to think is beginning to emerge more and more more and more people are finding the joy of it because ultimately that's the missing word in education is is joy and again it goes back to what the children deserve and if we don't believe they deserve joy then personally i don't know why we're in education and that goes all the way up to the top of the dfe if you know if we can't see that joy is got to do it i question why we're in there but anyway um but ultimately yeah it is it's it's we are we are trained in our teacher colleges and universities how to do guided reading there's a lesson plan all these things but what we're being told is is how to control you're told how to do behavior management most behavior management comes back to the adult world we set up we set up rules because what we try to control controls us the more you put in control the more you you stress about what you can't control and then what do we do we blame the children and then it's the children that that you know they missed their playtime because they didn't do this or whatever you know so what does behavior management look like in your classroom it looks like joy it looks like enabling children to be engaged because the moment children are engaged behavior tends to just go because the children want to be there you know i have children and and i'm you know i'm i'm not um you know i'm not the perfect teacher i'm really not i'd like i want i want to become the perfect teacher that's what i want to be but you know i have children that did not want to go home at the weekend because they love school so much they wanted because they knew they were going to get like when i cut when i was in there when i was around them something good was going to happen yeah they knew it they knew because i was the co-player i was going to show them something really cool or i was going to listen to them and value them and if you're five you need to be valued you know again it goes back to this idea of the government's baseline testers that they're trying to do you know for you know they're talking about i know they've kind of postponed it for the year but ultimately children coming into a school and in the very first few weeks the adult world goes here we go have a test and that's what it is they call it a baseline assessment but it's not it's a test and what it's doing is it's telling children that they're going to get pushed to the side of their own lives you're not important and that's what it is we don't fact your play is not valued you do what i tell you to do when you're in here so the idea is is that you have these you have a in terms of behavior management my way of doing it was to have an agreed set of rules with the children yeah that they recognized and that if children went outside of those parameters the children would say that's not fair because we agree this so they're self-managing they self-manage it because ultimately they want to play and learn because what you're trying to do is create the culture where play is valued because if you value play you value children if you don't value play i don't i don't i it's an open question as to whether you value childhood because the two are together and they're extricable and when does play kind of fizzle out and stop i mean i'm thinking at the moment about the why do we open your schools in the autumn and i've talked a lot to colleagues in EYFS and primary about play and colleagues in secondary are saying well what about us does it matter for us too do children need to play as they return and what do you think about that in secondary school or just generally uh in secondary school in particular should we be encouraging play i i certainly think we need to encourage the echoes of play yeah in terms of you know i i often come back to the idea of show not tell we show children but we don't directly tell them we have to you know children are born curious you know when when babies drop their food out of the high chair they want to know where it goes and they look down they don't look up they look down they're learning through their curate they're learning about gravity in a very very simple baby brain yeah that's what they're doing and so you know ultimately the question is is when does it end you know my my son's now and my daughter's 18 so she's finished her she's done with her secondary education but then my my son's 14 and he's an amazing school that actually really do encourage them to be curious there's lots of project work that goes on and it's not just do do do do do do and they're one of the most top you know they're the second top performing school in Devon out of all of the schools private and independent they're a state school and they're led by a head teacher that gets children it's cool to be who you are that's kind of their ethos and it's not about just like machine gun teaching they just they give you time and space to follow your interests and use those as best as they can so I greatly believe it is about this idea of the echoes of play which is why play is so important in nursery yeah that should be like like really humming with play and then it kind of goes up and as you go through because the curriculum gets you know this idea that the adult world says you've got to have all this knowledge you've got to know you know what a fronted adverbial is at the age of seven yeah you know exactly and you know if anyone anyone can explain to me where the joy of a fronted adverbial is that the age of seven I would love to go have a drink with them because there is none there is no my daughter's actually I remember her literally crying over fronted adverbials when she was about that age and she was crying and crying and crying and I kind of was what's the problem Lyra what's the matter and all I could get from her was fronted adverbials and I just I just it just was a foreign language to me I had no idea I couldn't help her so I didn't understand what the problem was or even what those words meant yeah absolutely no absolutely and it's kind of like what we generally value within our education system these are the big you know these are eternal questions that will ever you know they've gone on for for years and the fact they've gone on for years is ultimately to the shame of our our education system I suppose you know my my son can can do the most absolutely amazing kind of fractions and algebra that just leaves me just like wow what is that at the age of 40 um and I'm you know I'm I'm really proud of him because actually he's got an amazing sense of justice you know he he's an amazing boy but does he really need to know about all these fractions and you know etc at the age of 14 if he didn't have a really good sense of self which comes first is it the sense of self or is it a fronted adverbial at the age of seven I would argue it's a sense of self because we're going to need children to be the adults who are creative and the problem solvers and not just be the robots we don't need robots but we really don't know and how do we support children who might have um sort of special or additional needs for example is there any additional work that needs to be done there to enable them to play or do they yeah um yeah there can be I mean just thinking about children and actually my own son um so autistic children and let's generally speaking now so I recognised you know there's there was a I don't want to be too kind of like but um they can find it quite hard to play in terms of imagination um it can be quite limited um in inverted commas what I did was I created something called play projects um which is in my second book called The Magic of Children and play projects is a way of putting a framework over play okay to enable children and the adult world to see the value of play and its opportunities um they're an amazing way to work with children and um where we've done it in schools and I did it with my own school where I had two uh quite quite high functioning autistic children but they found imaginative play quite difficult yeah um that it was transformative because it was like the adults had just shown them what play is to start with yeah I was going to say it's appealing to me but then I'm an autistic adult who didn't really ever learn to play so uh yeah give me a script and I'll give it a crack yes well it's kind of is like that it's it's a bit like um it's it's it's like it what it does is it dissects play so we talk about play this is the problem with the adult world we talk about play but what is play and so I've done lots of work in my second book The School and The Magic of Children on breaking it down as to what it actually is and what's the answer well there's 10 things along the way I'll try to remember them but one of them one of them is about is creativity and it can be can be something I said I'm talking about I'll talk about my own son my own son found very difficult because he he just couldn't get past that he would line cars up and count them but he couldn't role play with the cars particularly it wasn't his fascination and you know at the age of three he could count you know beyond 200 it was you know it wasn't yeah I know it was it was amazing some alarm bells should have been going off in my brain shouldn't have that time we should have known a bit more um but ultimately my son taught me how to parent that's what he did he showed me that I needed to change okay in what way well because I I kept having all these demands of him as a parent that I thought that's what was parenting but ultimately I needed to listen to him and it's that idea of listening to children which then created the play project this idea of play projects finding out what they didn't understand or did understand and then create the framework to put over the top of play so that children can see the breakdown of it so there's like building blocks of play yeah and then you can then model to the children to those particular children how to how to play yeah and often what it did was it just I don't know it just pushed open the door and then they were away it's a really beautiful way it is a beautiful way to work I mean I would say that because I created it but it's it's the impact is is is huge it's out where have you kind of tried it out or who's used it um I used to do it in my own practice um and there's well whoever's read my book I mean my second it's in my second book um and it's something that could in theory be huge coming out of lockdown yeah I've pressed pause on it because I don't want it just to be associated with lockdown because play is not just for lockdown it's for life so I've had this kind of like but it is and so and I didn't and so I've got something else called Drawing Club yeah which is equally as impactful with children but I've not really done anything with them yet because I want to for September to come around right let's go because they they're both really um yeah they're really exciting ways to work with children but the schools that have explored them already have been there's one school that I've been exploring them going up into year six yeah all the way up into year six so what they do is they take plate up with the children okay okay so you kind of held back a little bit from these projects which would be really helpful as we leave lockdown because you don't want to be associated only with lockdown if I understood that right yeah so so I mean so if you if people have read the book the second book lovely they know about it but lots of people hear about my work because I do workshops with them yeah around them yeah but I it can't just be a lockdown thing okay it's not a lockdown thing so I'm kind of and again there's been so much emotion all around lockdown with you know government advice 30 different documents coming out every week you know washing hands and you know it would just get swallowed up but now schools have got a chance hopefully to just breathe a little bit yeah because you know crikey schools have worked they have worked so you know unbelievably hard and are really challenging circumstances um I think they've been forgotten a little bit along the way um what I'm hoping is come September I then it will start picking up because I've also got something called Adventure Island I was going to ask about that I saw that on your website tell me about Adventure Island well Adventure Island is a way of creating a whole new realm it's a new dimension to explore so it's make believe okay um and I created it last year and it was just taking off so what does that I mean was it I still I have no idea what would tell me more okay so so the idea is you create a landscape of the imagination with the children so through thinking talking making building I think it's it's all make believe so to begin with you just tell the children Adventure Island has popped up outside now if you're four can you imagine how exciting it is to know that Adventure Island's popped up you know nothing about it but it links in with something that I developed called the message centre which is a way of writing with children which is extraordinary when it goes and it's all about using secret symbols and hiding and finding because the idea of giving the joy of phonics as a gift and then there are certain characters that live and if you've watched play school tv you'll have met some of them along the way um there are certain characters that live on Adventure Island and so it goes from there so the children then go on an adventure when they go outside and there's a whole host of imaginary characters it's a little bit like the bridge to Tiruvavathir if you've ever read that or or watched the film okay if you haven't it's an amazing book and an amazing film but it's basically a make believe world yeah that you visit with the children and characters come and characters go challenges come yeah and it's beautiful and because it's a collective thing what happens is um in the group that that people can join there's a way and then of sharing so for example there's one one school has created a character called Bitbots and Bitbots are like drones that fly around and those Bitbots to take messages but those Bitbots then can then be sent to other schools so Adventure Island is being done around the world so even if you're in Thailand Adventure Island goes all the way out there and back again it's an extraordinary way to work with children it really is lovely and what was lovely today someone messaged me and just said this is the recovery curriculum that children need it's just round with joy and creativity it is beautiful because you know um did you know the story Bog Baby yes yeah so um you use and there's a minpins as well out of roll dial so you use characters that the children are familiar with as well as creating new ones so that new ones are like characters like Grumpar and the Poggle and the Bog Babies so children go and make detectors for them and because they they live under the ground and the Bog Babies follow them home and it's just lovely and the greatest thing about it is the parents buy into it massively I was going to ask about whether parents are up for this or not they absolutely love it I've been inundated in lockdown with people sending me photographs of parents who have kept it at home because everyone lives on Adventure Island because you believe in Father Christmas if you're from that tradition and you believe in the and the Tooth Fairy and both of those live on Adventure Island you already live on it but you use it as an educational tool because there's problems along the way to solve and numbers and the characters leave various things for the children and it's just super exciting isn't that just kind of hiding learning in play if there's numbers along the way and it's kind of like that but it just what it does is it's the emotional connection to learning okay if you're if you're sat at a table doing a worksheet who are you doing it for you're doing it for the teacher children aren't stupid they know they're doing it for the teacher yeah whereas if you're on Adventure Island or in play who are you doing it for yourself and instantly you're connected to what you're doing and the moment you're connected to what you're doing my belief is is you're truly learning because you're learning for yourself and not for the adult and that's the beauty of co-play so does learning all have to be fun to be impactful do you think no no it's no it doesn't have to be um it would be good to try to make it be it's it goes back to this idea of it not necessarily just being about fun it's to me play itself as a moral imperative there's no choice to give children play because it's inside of them and it's who they are so the idea really is to try to say to ourselves okay so how can we especially in early childhood make sure children get this adventure so back off with all the formal sitting at tables just let leave that if we want children to be joyful in their learning let's give them you know if we really want children to be writers and readers let's give them joy when they're five yeah not an hour of phonics just so that we can say that they can pass a phonics screening test because that ain't joy so i guess it's about kind of tapping into a motivation really isn't it making them want to engage absolutely because that is they've got it it's like an energy children are dying they're desperate to play yeah tell me about play school tv so i've i've had i've had a bit of a look at it and it looks it looks really fun yeah like lots of of you in the woods and your lovely dogs bonnie and epi having having a lot of fun well the idea with play school tv is um so lockdown came of course um and there was quite a lot of schools who who are really interested in adventure island so basically play school tv is me on adventure with my dogs we meet all the characters along the way on adventure island and what i'm doing is i'm modeling it's it's like one hopefully and lots of children watch it but the idea is it brings joy it brings learning it shows that learning can go anywhere so for example there's apps to my mind there's nothing wrong with showing three year olds how to count in 100s we could you do it because it's not the curriculum it's just because it's joy it's about playing with numbers and playing with words so often in the program i would just make up silly rhymes or because what i'm doing is i'm playing with ideas yeah i'm playing with this idea that because really adventure island is a living story book it's not fixed which is one of the beauties of it because you have children that will come to school who will have a real like rich canon of stories that they've been read yeah next to them will be children that don't they haven't been i mean i call it book snuggled they haven't been snuggled with so the children that have been book snuggled cross pollinate with the children that haven't they lend them as soon as you go on to adventure island you can guarantee the gingerbread man will pop up yeah these characters will come from traditional tales of three little pigs but if i haven't been book snuggled i won't know them so the children share their their their sort of literacy if you like but the idea of play school tv is really to model this idea of show and tell yeah and the adventure so the schools that have really got involved with it they often watch it and then the children are desperate weirdly they're desperate to go to adventure island weirdly they don't believe i'm real they believe bonnie and epi are real but they don't believe i'm real why do you think that is no idea i went into a school the day in bristol and walked for the dinner hall and there was this because i because they watched play school tv and there i was and one of the children just went where's bonnie and epi that's all they're interested in but that's kind of why they're why they're there because ultimately you know they don't they don't know who i am but there's no there's no there's no emotional connection to me it's to the dogs and the dogs in a way are that cure because dogs and animals play yeah they're the players they go once you know and it's all done normally in one take so i'm just literally i was gonna ask about that do you kind of carefully plan it and script it and no no i i i know i know the learning that's going to be in them and i know the storyline if you like but the actual content i just have to go with the dogs i have to go with their reactions or i i have you know if it looks like they're coming towards me then they've brought an idea to me i'm giving all this the secrets of play school tv but you know i'm just recording on my iphone it's just the idea is to create over a hundred episodes that over time can be like a teaching resource so that when people go on to adventure island they've got it as a way of oh okay that's what the poggle does or you know this is where grandpa lives so there's an episode a couple of episodes where we go into grove and pa's house he's like a really grumpy character and um i couldn't take the dogs in with me because it's uh it's an abandoned building and the guy that owns it didn't want the dogs in so i had to pretend that the dogs have been kidnapped you know imagine the age of five your brain i was i'm loving i'm loving going on these adventures with you okay so the dogs have been kidnapped you're in an abandoned building which is where the ground ball is and so to get through it's a bit like the crystal maze to get across different rooms i had to to read or recognize certain numbers or use different words so again trying to sprinkle language over the top of what happens and then across the five days i ended up finding bonnie and epi they've been shrunk and put up the chimney in grumpy house so i could rescue them and then of course there's like a secret word that we've got to read and then that brought brought them back to real real size so they're okay again now they're okay yeah they're okay but this week we've got the character smeach and smeach is the queen goblin and she litters adventure island so it's a week just trying to kind of explore litter and tidying up i could have used the wambles i suppose but smeach was just i like smeach smeach is great so you're aiming to get over 100 episodes yeah um uh yeah so i'm on episodes it's quite a long way through no yeah 78 i've done 78 um but i'll just keep going i mean when when i begin to go back to traveling again um to go and do training in schools i'm hoping to um to still do it and i'm also looking along the way and if there's anyone watching who's got one spare to give to me is to take your van out and go and do adventure island with the van and go into different places oh wow so yeah it's um yeah i don't know it just i'll just keep doing it as a i love doing it and you know the feedback's just been amazing do you do it every day is it a daily thing it's a daily thing the episodes come out every day but i record i record all five episodes in one morning um bonnie who's the little jack russell she she you're probably if you if people watch it they'll see she's very reluctant whereas epi just is all over me bonnie takes one look she finds it i don't know she just walks off so often i have to talk to bonnie of camera quite a bit um but epi just loves it she just loves it have you had any um sort of moments where someone's kind of come across you talking to your dogs on your phone in the woods it's only happened once there's a character called hoddy dodd who's a giant and there's a particular part of the um of the wood uh where uh there was like some big dips in the ground and i was pretending that there is footprints in the ground and um i fell into it and i just looked up and there was this guy just staring at me but no it's it's a you know it's a it's a really big wood um so you can i can normally find somewhere where it's okay but even if they did it doesn't matter just have to shoot it again i wonder what they would think that's it i was i was watching it earlier i was just thinking i wonder if anyone kind of comes across you and and then actually what do you think you know if they do do you would you explain it to someone or yeah i've some some people are you know as i've been walking through i've i've got my my phone on my on my tripod some people ask some people have recognised it some of the local children watch it i've got like a little brick outside where i live with scott holes in it i often leave messages for the children in the brick they will leave messages for me and stuff from the from from adventure which is quite sweet that's really lovely yeah they they love it so yeah it's good fun so you'd normally then if we weren't in lockdown you'd be traveling around talking to different kids in different schools what what's your normal role at like yes i tend to um i i tend to be invited into schools go and work directly with with teams excitingly increasingly beyond early years as well which is really good um that that really makes me happy when i get to work with key stage one because it means that schools are really trying to explore the joy of learning um but yeah so and i do conferences as well but i also work with some local authorities along the way just to kind of support them in their work um certainly leads for example are really really excited about the potential of venture island um and i'm hoping to go there next year to go do some work with them but of course we kind of need to come out of all the yeah you know it's not an easy landscape for the minute for particularly for nurseries you know they've been decimated by this and you know they need to focus on their future at the minute yeah it was just a sensitive and what do you think is the the kind of the the role of play as people do return from lockdown i mean you've you've alluded quite a bit to the fact that people are recognizing that it's going to be important um and you don't want this just to be a moment in time but presumably there's the potential here that as people recognize the importance of kind of play in nurture as we return that it might ignite something that could continue that's that's that's my greatest wish yeah it's not it's and i know my message isn't that you've got to play all day every day you know that would be that would be foolish to say that because you there's no way you could do that not if you know if you're in year five in year six you know it just wouldn't it wouldn't work it just wouldn't work but what it's about is trying to say but how can you make the how can you find the echoes of play how can you at least give children some choice and creativity and real collaboration how can we do that bit and do it genuinely and and not be you know not everything's got to be an intervention and you know you can you know the greatest thing with co-play you can really work on the minutiae of learning with children in those moments you know i've done it when year two where um with the my approach the message center which is all about these secret messages etc but part of it is the magic of words and words make things happen like magic spells yeah and the moment you sprinkle spellings over the top of children's creations to make things happen yeah their spelling's just like because they want to do it rather than having a spelling test so it's just about recognizing well we've got a curriculum but can we do it in a way that gives children space the choice and it's that bit i think i would really try and encourage schools to do and what's uh you know do you have any advice in terms of practical steps there that the teachers and support staff can take in terms of integrating play in that way in a meaningful way well that's where my play projects come comes in and certainly with with schools that i've worked with they've they've tended to have in years one and two they've tended to have maybe more sort of let's use the word formal or added directed mornings and then they've tried in the afternoon to run play projects either once or twice a week yeah what happens is children come in and demand them and then you've got to do them and that's what's lovely and the play projects that if people wanted to find out about those they're all in your second book they're all in they're all in my second book school the magic of children and i'm also going to be over the summer holidays i will be creating some to video tutorials on on kind of go and play now dot com that because some people access training better yeah on the on it on a tutorial so it'd be like it'd be like a walk through but certainly where i've done uh in my own um in my subscription mental group we've talked about event about play projects with them and the people in that group were just like oh my goodness this is it so i know they i mean they absolutely can work and they're not they're not difficult to do okay just takes the step of faith to trust children that they can direct their own learning so a bit of a leap of faith there but then people will learn from seeing the results i guess absolutely yeah of course i'm absolutely absolutely because the thing is what happens when you allow children to play something happens to you as well as an adult you start to transform you start to just again it's not it's it's you just it's like your soul starts to feel good wow that's deep but it's true it's it is it's like a it's like a it's like a rebirth it is like a rebirth but that's going to take a certain amount of trust i guess isn't it trusting in the children trusting in ourselves yeah absolutely yeah it's about it's about that openness to letting go just letting go and letting go isn't about losing learning and it's not it's just about saying to children right have some space and you're still there as the co-player that's the thing so when you do play projects you're just going in and you're sprinkling skills over the top of what children do and it's a really really beautiful really beautiful way to work i mean when i've done it in schools i've did one in a school they hadn't the children hadn't played for two years and i did it yeah they hadn't had any play for two years and i said what we'll do play projects we set it up and the teachers were like this isn't going to work and did it work yeah it absolutely did because the children took ownership of it and the teachers were just like and they could see because what happened was the children had shown them and they had brilliantly just allowed children to show them what they were capable of how come they were up for play if they hadn't done it for all that time what what changed it because i was there but why were you there as in you must have been invited in or i was invited in the head the head teacher wanted to explore how to enable more play in the school okay but that's not that's not an easy thing to do in terms of the training that we have as teachers so that's why play projects can can can really work because it helps and they could they could just see it yeah and so we just did it as like a trial thing 60 children and the outcomes were just extraordinary so if people want a starting point then it sounds like play projects is a good kind of way in yeah absolutely absolutely and you know and hopefully this this coming year as you know touch wood the world begins to open up in whatever way it does i can begin to kind of get out and you know it's not about trying to show people that are doing something wrong it's not that i'm doing this this will sound a bit mad but i do this really out of love because play is love when we give children space to play we're valuing them we're seeing them that's my belief so i do this to try and support teachers on their adventure into play all you all teachers have to do is want to go on the adventure and then it's that moment as soon as you want to go on it that magic door does appear and then it's about stepping through what thought would you like to finish with i think it's important to leave in people's mind something deep go on Greg um i think i think probably i think i'll just go back to this idea of childhood being this chrysalis for identity and that play is childhood that they are that you cannot separate them and play is learning and it's the most valuable type of learning and ultimately it's a gift to us as educators we can step into the children's world rather than bringing them out of their world into ours if we go into theirs then it's it's a it's a it's the most incredible place to go adventuring in it's like going into Narnia and who doesn't want to go to Narnia