In Motion: Meeting Children's Kinesthetic Needs through Play

One of the most frequent comments I get from friends and strangers who view my photos of play-space setups is that my home resembles a children's museum. I post a lot of "before" photos, but I don't often share the ones that I truly think are museum pieces: the aftermath. The play residue. Bless this mess! I have written on the Cleanup Conundrum before and in both my classrooms and my home, it is always a recurring theme to be navigated. We've all been there--reminding [sometimes over and over again] our children to "clean up one thing before they move to the next," or that "toys from the 'block area' stay in the 'block area.'" Or "you need to use the paintbrush and not your hands," or "keep the beans in the sensory bin." And yet, it's still happening. Over and over again, the children are moving about, carrying little (or big) objects in their hands. They are fleeing from one space to the next. Their play doesn't look at all like your plan.

Anyone with my photography skills who has every tried to capture young kids on camera can tell you one thing: they are always in motion. And I talk a lot here about play as a noun, but today I am talking about play as a verb. Because play is movement. It is seldom sedentary and even when it is, the movement is still there on a finer, more subtle level. Play meets a variety of developmental, cognitive, social emotional and physical needs. Children learn through play and play is constantly in motion. Kinesthetic learning is what is achieved through activity that relates to a person's awareness of their body's position and movement. Meeting children's kinesthetic needs is vital to development and it is also one of the areas most greatly hindered by our constant drive to have children "sit still" and "stay put."

I am guilty of it quite often. Before I can even process a way to "get to yes," the words "no, you can't..." have already fled my lips. And I can't condone activities in the home or classroom that are dangerous or even ones that simply don't work for everyone in the shared environment. But what I can encourage in myself as well as my peers, is a space. A brief moment to stop and ask yourself: "what play need is being expressed?" before those words of "no, you can't..." make a run for it.

I remember a few years ago taking S and then, baby Y, to an indoor play space. S was playing in a room set up like a kitchen when he grabbed a pretend bottle of soap and proceeded to walk out with it and toward another area. Another adult, also a parent and early childhood educator, stopped him and said "you need to put that back. It stays in the kitchen." I, however, wanted to wait and watch. And sure enough, S, ever on the mission to his next "appointment" was too busy to hear and continued on, soap in hand, to the veterinarian center where he proceeded to give a plush dog a bath. He needed soap to wash the dog. And meanwhile, the adult conversation continued.

"Children need order," said the other adult. "They need to know that everything has a place and that is where it belongs."

"Yes," I agreed. "But sometimes, their play has purpose and function. Sometimes when I have stepped back and waited, I can see their plan being carried out and not just a toy being carried about." On this occasion, there had been a purpose and a plan. S was "functionally" playing with the soap in another area. There are also plenty of times when that purpose is less obvious. When one of the children does flee the scene and it looks like a disaster zone. The purpose is harder to envision here, and sometimes, still, a purpose is there--even if it is merely the need to keep moving.

I will be completely honest: messes make me anxious. I have had to let go of a lot in order to function as a teacher, a wife and a mother. Especially in small spaces. Especially in shared spaces. Sometimes I think half of my enjoyment in constantly remodeling my playroom is that it is one way in which I can control the aesthetics of one space in my home. My actual kitchen is a disaster. So I did a Pinterest search, found an article titled "How to Make a Toy Kitchen Set out of a $10 Piece of Furniture," and headed to the thrift store, wearing C, on a mission. I, of course, found a piece of furniture for $10. It was on wheels. It should be easy to move. So I bought it. I buckled C into her car seat and wheeled that thing on out to my van where I quickly discovered it weighs more than an elephant. A nice man came out to help me wedge it into my minivan. By this time, C is screaming her head off at the aforementioned Nice Man. We make the drive around the corner just fine with no visibility in the back of me where I discover, lo and behold, that now I cannot get this hunk of $10 Pinterest Purchase out of my van and I need to before it's time to pick up the boys from school. So, my very patient and loving husband comes by on his lunch break to rescue me and now there is a refurbished kitchen in my living room.

So along with this crazy need to control a cluttered environment, I have also learned not only to tolerate the chaos (ok, maybe I'm still working on learning that one), I have also grown to see the "play residue" as an aspect of true beauty. Evidence of play, to me, is a sign of my success. I have not made the most nutritious dinner. I have not finished (or even started) the laundry. I have not clipped my kids' nails in...well, let's not even go there... But I have met the play needs of my children. And there is evidence of that all over my house, because play is motion.

If you look a little closer at the photo above, you will see that there is pasta all over the table and even some on the floor. There is a collection of tumbled stones mixed in. Here is the amazing thing that happened:

We had a playdate with some wonderful friends who have three kids all close in age to my own three kids. Our sensory bin in the kitchen is filled with dried pasta and some wooden containers and some Chinese soup spoons. There was a glass jar of tumbled stones in the kitchen set. The children wanted to make a party. They gathered everything they'd need. They walked back and forth between the actual kitchen where our sensory bin is and the toy kitchen, carrying pasta in containers and bowls to bring to the table for the party. The rocks became "bubble gum" and the party expanded to include catering service.

Y brought me the most delicious bowl of soup. The soup d'jour was one of tree cross sections and cinnamon sticks. This game involved a great deal of transporting, filling, pouring, dumping, picking up, gathering, moving, carrying...

I could have said that what was in the sensory bin must stay in the sensory bin. But why? Why couldn't it be carried somewhere else? I could have said that the dishes in the kitchen set were not for use in the sensory bin, but why not? They are just as useful for scooping, pouring, filling and transporting as the ones already in there.


And meanwhile, on the carpet...

Those magnetiles were definitely part of our building area and not our kitchen set, but Y discovered that the tray from our kitchen set was magnetic and it was quite a lot of fun to build both flat across it and in three dimensional form. And yes, the spoons and ladle and even the challah and "yogurt" have been evicted from the tray and seemingly abandoned, but discovery waits for no man.

This is play in motion. I am a huge advocate for loose parts play, and yet, I am not among the Pedagogy Police who stress the importance of loose parts being "open ended" or "all natural" or "not a single function toy." Because anyone who has studied the work of Simon Nicholson, the man behind the theory, will see that a loose part is anything that can be moved and manipulated in a variety of ways. And anyone who has observed children deeply engaged in play will note that everything can be moved and manipulated in a variety of ways.

 In another vignette, the boys are eagerly working with a small jar of chalk they carried from the atelier to our chalkboard wall (contact paper on a closet door). Y begins to make lines up and down, jumping as high as he can, crouching all the way to the bottom. S joins in. The movement is enormous and fast and loud. S certainly is capable of the fine motor control of a piece of chalk. He is capable of writing letters and words and drawing pictures that resemble what he is drawing about. But he is jumping and scribbling just like Y. And then he begins to use his hands to smudge and blend the colors. I am envisioning colorful hand prints all over the walls and surfaces of our home. I am tired because it is 5:00 and while every day has, in theory, 24 hours, it seems that 23 of them fall between 5 and 6 when my husband gets home from work. I want to say "no," but I stop myself. What play need is being expressed? Why is a child who a), is capable of 'functional' chalk use and b) somewhat sensory averse to getting his hands dirty scribbling wildly across the length of a closet door covered in chalkboard paper and smearing his hands through it with vigor and vim?!
Because he needs that movement. He needed to jump high and crouch low. He needed to feel the air beneath his feet. He needed to stretch his arms and bend his needs. He needed to see what would happen when the colors mixed. And what that would look like on the chalkboard. And what color it would turn his skin. And the chalk dust, he said, felt like flour, and reminded him of baking. Baking is something we do together and it makes him feel nurtured and loved.

So instead of saying no, I found a way to get to yes. It did not really work for me to have wild chalk prints all around my home, but this is what did work:

I asked S to take a break to wash his hands. Y, by this time, had already moved on to building a "tower for Elsa" out of magnetiles. When his hands were restored to S-color and not a murky green (which is, in fact, the color that results from smearing your hands across a chalkboard covered in rainbow chalk), I invited him to take a piece of black cardstock from the atelier shelf and an art mat and bring it to the table. He chose chalk pastels this time instead of regular chalk--more colors, more opportunities.
And to be clear, this was not a neat and tidy activity, either, but it was a bit more contained. He applied layer upon layer of chalk to the paper, smearing, smudging, spreading, mixing. The movements were smaller and more finite, but he was very much still in motion. There was chalk dust on the table and he asked how he could clean it up. I had him get a rag from the kitchen and he wet it in the bathroom sink and washed the area around his work space. It was not perfect. In fact, I should probably also mention that the orange fingerprints on my Patagonia jacket are also not perfect (and I have no idea how they got there). The green streaks on the bathroom sink were also not perfect. And the orange stains on the hand towel---not perfect. But the play experience here was perfect in every way. I asked S if he wanted another piece of black paper when he was done with the first and had hung it up on our front door. He did not. He had met his need and he was done and ready to move on. I could have said no. It would have been totally fine to do that. It would have been a lot less messy to do that. But do you know how many times I have to say no in just that 5-6PM hour alone? It gets as tiring to say it as it does to hear it. And I really learned a lot about the need behind his play when I slowed myself down to wonder why he was moving so quickly.

Like anything else, meeting children's kinesthetic needs through play in any space, especially shared ones and especially small ones, is a balancing act (sometimes literally). We cannot always say "yes," and even when we can, we still won't. And it's ok. But I still hold on quite firmly to my simultaneous agreement and disagreement with that aforementioned person at the public play space. Yes, children need order and need to know that things have a place. And they also need to be able to move. To carry little (or big) things in their little hands from space to space. To carry out a plan that maybe makes no sense to us or maybe looks like a mess. That maybe has an obvious purpose and function or maybe a less obvious one.

What happened at the end of our pasta party playdate? Well, at first, nothing. At first I honestly just planned to tackle the "play residue" once the kids were in bed. But then the two boys wanted to use playdough and there was no room at either of our tables. Dinner and snack remnants were still strewn across our dining room table and piles of pasta at the kids' table. The boys decided to clean up on their own. I helped a bit once they started, but for the most part, they did it independently--even little Y. They were just as capable of carrying all that pasta back to the sensory bin as they were at carrying it out in the first place. Things went back into their places (more or less) and I have even learned to "let go" of always needing to be in charge of where those places are. Sometimes there is even purpose, function and an element of intentional design in how they clean and set things up. Now there is a little LED lantern from our small world shelf displayed and flickering on the kitchen set counter. Now there is a heart shaped rock in the cabinet. Now there is a tin lunchbox packed with "slices of bread" inside an old suitcase that holds our dress up clothes for the next "trip" the boys will take.

Children do need order, but who is to determine what that is? When we see even very young children as capable of designing and managing a space in a way that they find aesthetically appealing and accessible, we begin not only to honor them as the tiny humans they already are, but also to expand our own breadth of what beauty and function look like. We learn a great deal about how we learn by watching that learning in action. And photos are sedentary; play is not. Play is motion.