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As a young child I spent large amounts of time in the garden playing and exploring. If I wasn't playing outside I was sitting on my trampoline reading or jumping. Outdoors was a big part of who I was as a child. I spent a lot of time catching public transport to and from places so I learnt how to observe and let myself wonder as I waited for the bus or the train. While outside in my back garden while recording the video I flashed back to being a child and just standing in the corner of my backyard and thinking about all the different places I could play, I remembered using different parts to be different places in my play world i.e. trampoline was the house, the clothes line was my shops. Each part of the yard was something that I could use in my own way.

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Mr Cricket's Adventure

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Connecting my childhood and explaining my Creative Work

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Connecting my childhood and explaining my Creative Work

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The concept behind Mr Cricket's adventure comes from reading We're Going on a Bear Hunt when I was younger. This was one of my favourite books as a child; I remember reading it repeatedly in Kindergarten. I remember engaging in the story and pretending to stomp through the squishy mud and swish through the tall grass. I remember spending lots of time outside in the garden playing with my sister. We would use the grass as pretend food and on the really windy days I would pretend that the trees are monsters coming to get me and my sister.

Spending time outside was a very natural part of my childhood in fact I remember being outside more than anything else, if we aren't in our back garden we would be at the park playing with our friends. It was during the moments of outdoor play that we learned a lot of our major skills that we use now like sharing, problem solving and language development.

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From a young age, children are constantly engaging in dramatic/imaginative play. We see from the middle of the second year through ages four–five, make-believe evolves from simple imitation of adults' actions (pretending to drink from a cup) to complex, cooperative creation of imaginary scenes with peers enacting a spaceship launch. (Rakoczy, Tomasello and Striano, 2005; Kavanaugh, 2006). This means that when children engage in their play, while it may seem like it's come from nowhere, the children are using real-life examples and adapting them into their play. During The Adventure of Mr Cricket I used the feeling of walking through grass with open-toe shoes to help explain how the grass moved over Mr Cricket.

Children have an inbuilt spirit of inquisitiveness and creativity and are intuitively sociable, loving the adventure of doing. (Dancing & Teaching Ideas 2025) This means that while children at at play they are not just playing but are exploring the world around them. While recording Mr Crickets adventures I spent time exploring the garden around me, I looked at everything on offer and thought about how I would have played in the garden when I was a child. Would I have seen the tree's as a big scary monster? Would I have seen the grass as something soft and squishy? Or would I have used the grass as place to hide in.

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Edwards et al (2011) states that It is important not to absorb only the formal part of works of art, as often happens, but instead to work on ideas and concentrate attention on the concepts that generated the work of art. This is further supported by the Video Atelier (2018) the video shows a open ended classroom, it's a classroom that allows for children to move from project to project, to take charge of their learning in their own ways. It's a classroom where there are no designated sections, it's a place that encourages children to explore in their own way. As a future teacher I would like to create a classroom that is like this, a classroom that is limitless and allows children to take charge of their learning.

This however would promote a challenge as in a Early childhood education setting there is a expectation that everything has a place and that children should pack up with their experience before moving onto something new. There is not enough time or space given to allow children to move as they wish through their ideas, if we were to allow children to explore their ideas independently then for what could be seen through a child's eyes as exploring experience could be seen as wastage from an adults perspective.

In saying this there are still ways that I could support this style of learning into my setting by:

Allowing for more time. Allowing children more time to explore the resources instead of having to get through all of the experiences in that one day allow for children to spend more time reflecting and engaging in the play

Taking a step back and allowing children to reflect on their learning, instead of expecting children to create 20 of the exact same experiences allow for children to come up with their own ideas and use prompts such as "I can see that you are making..." "Can you tell me about what you are making?"

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Brooker, L., Blaise, M., & Edwards, S. (2014). The SAGE handbook of play and learning in early childhood. Sage Reference. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/edgehill/reader.action?docID=1712668

Creative Dance for Early Childhood. (2020, June 7). Dance Teaching Ideas. https://danceteachingideas.com/creative-dance-movement-for-toddlers/

The Atelier. (2018, January 2025). The Atelier: The school without walls [Video]. YouTube.

https://youtu.be/vNAKhgATlAo?si=yp95_zO_Vq7b7rVK

Edwards, C., Gandini, L., & Forman, G. (Eds.). (2011). The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia experience in transformation. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=820317