The "In between Times"

Today was the fifth Family Nature Playgroup that I run at our local library.  The community support and appreciation has been wonderful.  It has been a tremendous amount of work to plan the curriculum, prepare, and now facilitate the sessions. Luckily my children have been willing helpers to test activities and make art examples.  They even put up with the fact that their mom is not able to give them her full attention: Attendance has been nearly 50 at each session.  Thank goodness I work with tremendous volunteers with years and years of experience helping to work with  children and one staff person who speaks Somali fluently and has provided fabulous family support and community outreach.

 In some ways each week gets a little easier, but in other ways it remains challenging as I raise my expectations to differentiate the learning activities in more minute ways.  Since the station activities are now more or less self running,  I have been able to work on the field activities with the preschool aged children.   For the first few sessions it was only a small 15 minutes of the entire 90 minutes.  Today it ran in shifts, but included activities for large motor skills and hands on nature investigation for almost 50 minutes.   Today we did the "run and find activity" around the topic of birds.  The kids ran and found a tree they would want to make a nest in, a source of water, a cliff, and a meadow.  They also learned how to use binoculars, even though in the bright morning light and open parkland there were not too many birds to focus in on.  We played a game called "owl and mouse" and did parachute games focusing on attributes of birds and also incorporating bird calls.  At story time we shared The Fox and Crane fable in English and Somali and then I shared some of the materials from the Burke Box on Birds with the children.

All of this effort leads to great background experience for my children, but it is not nearly as magical as the play that happens when my children just have unstructured time.  It is the "in between times" when my boys have their most amazing growth.  It is when they come most into their own.  Everything they have learned from life and story and experience comes out --along with their fullest personality.

My boys, who are often quiet and contained, wrestle and chase each other and the neighbor through the yard on bicycle.  They take turns narrating their adventure yelling out challenges: " lets go through the bricks, down this trail into the garden bed, zooming around this tree.  Oh wait! A bear, drop the bikes, climb the tree.  Hungry now into the play house- make some dinner back to the bikes."

It is beautiful to watch the full exuberance of the boys' play.  The challenge is to learn to not over schedule or even get too involved but rather quietly let the play happen while I tend to something: the garden, my flat tire on my bike, or even just sit and do a few simple stretches.

I hope that all the families who attend playgroup go home and let the stories and activities from class take new shape in their youngsters. The "in between times" are as important as all the activities.