A school with no playground is like a house without a garden – children need somewhere to go to play and interact with other children away from the usual confines of the classroom or home to become a more rounded individual.

The classroom is for developing little minds and playgrounds are needed for the physical side of things, keeping fit, learning how to interact with other kids, and learning when to share and when to bite their tongue.

There is some debate to how much supervision teachers should give children in the playground and how much structure play requires. Of course, there should be a watchful eye on playground activities, who would intervene in case of fights.

But this is a new need, when I was a kid there was not a teacher in sight at playground time, they were too busy drinking a cup of tea and having a gossip with each other to even be bothered with what we got up to at break times, as long as we all came back in one piece when recreation ended.

We were left to our own devices, but it seems in this day and age that children are a new breed and there is far more concern as to what might happen in a playground, so parents are relieved when they find out teachers supervise playground activities.

Structure and activities are introduced in the playground to give the children something to do, rather than thinking about hurting each other. Instead they learn about teamwork and taking in turns and learning morals that will stay with for the rest of their lives.

Nowadays children need more guidance and encouragement to make sure that turn out to be respectable adults and the playground is becoming the ideal place to learn these essential social interaction skills.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 9:53 am and is filed under Playground. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.