Category Archives: How do we do movement as communicating?

How do we do movement as communicating?

Flipping Vehicles

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Nicole Land thinking with Sanja Todorovic and Jajiba Chowdhury

We thought with the children with a provocation of flipping over the vehicles (so they were belly and tires up) to try to ‘get to know’ them differently, and to see what happens if we shake up the children and vehicle’s well-known pathways around the yard. Often, we have noticed, the children use the plastic vehicles on familiar pathways, running around a shelter in the yard. How might we notice how we communicate with/in movement if we intentionally try to disrupt our well-travelled pathways?

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How do we do movement as communicating?

Sliding, Blankets, and taking Pauses Seriously

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Nicole Land thinking with Sanja Todorovic and Jajiba Chowdhury

After working to pay attention to how moving happened in communicative ways in the yard, we noticed that there seems to be something important happening with the slide. The playground has two side-by-side slides. We offered the children a provocation where we placed a blanket over one of the slides and we thought with the children about using half the blanket-covered slide. Jajiba and I were talking about the tensions in setting intentions for using the slide – when the children are interested in sliding with the blanket or taking it off of the slide, how do we balance that with sharing with them that our intention is to think together about using half the slide? How do we know when to push what our curiosities by ‘fixing’ the blanket on the slide (like, what happens when we use on side of the slide? Or, one slide is covered in the blanket – how can we use the other slide?) and when to notice how moving with the blanket is also a response to the provocation, also a way of the children engaging with the ‘problem’ we are offering them? I think that this is a question we need to keep negotiating with the children.

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How do we do movement as communicating?

Moving and Care

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Nicole Land thinking with Sanja Todorovic and Jajiba Chowdhury

Sanja proposed that we might think of moving as a way of working with an idea together, as we’ve been thinking with moving that happens with the side-by-side slides in the yard. I think this is really interesting and something to think with. Moving as grappling with an idea or concept or tension together; not as medium to resolve that tension or fully understand or learn a concept, but instead paying attention to how our movements become a way of thinking collectively about the complex relations we encounter in everyday moments. Moving as something complicated, not just physical or outcome-oriented. I am thinking, for example, of the ‘ideas’ that were present last week with the slide: care, negotiation, obstacles/interferences, proximity/closeness, energy/wildness, together and common/shared movements, and creating. These are complicated ideas, and often things that developmental theory might tell us are too complex for toddlers to think with, but through moving we do grapple together with these big, complex ideas. I think there are probably multiple other ideas we could pay attention to with the slide too. 

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How do we do movement as communicating?

Who Participates in Moving?

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Nicole Land thinking with Sanja Todorovic and Jajiba Chowdhury

I was thinking of our earlier conversations about running and about being curious how different ways of moving happen in your classroom, and what these different ways of moving do. I think that there is something quite interesting happening in noticing how and why different materials are carried, and how they travel, around the space. On Friday, there were lots of materials that were scooped up and carried around in lots of different ways: a hat that was carried around on heads and in hands, the coloured see-through block pieces that children carried in threes as they stretched their hands to hold three at a time, some children cuddling baby dolls against their bodies as they walked them around and others holding the dolls by their ankles or arms as they walked, the paint from the activity that got stuck to fingers before it was washed off, and books that were carried by their covers or carefully held flat as they travelled from the book carpet to other spaces. There is so much moving with materials that is unfolding, and I am interested in wondering and paying attention to what these moving relations create – what happens when dolls or paint or blocks or books move in particular ways? What does this moving open up? How do we shape how children move with these materials – why, how?

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How do we do movement as communicating?

What does Running do?

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Nicole Land thinking with Sanja Todorovic and Jajiba Chowdhury

In a toddler classroom, we began by being curious about running and thinking with questions of running and of what running ‘does’; what running creates, what running produces, what running invites, what consequences running generates. This makes me curious about how we get to know running. With what ideas or concepts or inheritances or relations do we build our understandings of what running does or how running happens with children? For me, when I try to name how I understand running, I think often about space and I consider running in relation to spatial considerations: running around bookshelves, running across tile floors, running in tight quarters. Another familiar way that I understand running is in relation to place: running on slippery grass, running across crosswalks, running on really hot days. My phys-ed training always makes me think too about running as gross motor skill: running as a form of locomotion, as an activity that happens at a high intensity, as a way to exercise our bodies. Space, place, and motor skills are then, for me, familiar ways of getting to know running, and they all have particular consequences for how I notice running, how I interpret running, and how I create conditions (spaces, rules, relations) for (or not for) running.  

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How do we do movement as communicating?

Plastic Toys, Playground Spaces, and Moving with the Yard

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By Andrea Thomas with Nicole Land

The warm season this year has flown by, but I remember very distinctly all the climbing and jumping off of surfaces that first captured our attention when we thought about movement this spring.  The climbing and jumping always creates some internal conflicts for me: is it safe for children to be climbing up on rocks, stumps, and trees? Is climbing safe for the plants and other living things in the environment?  

The playground was made for gross motor movements of the children, right?  Are they the only ones who matter? For years, some beautiful tiger lilies used to grow in the space at the top of the rock wall by the toddler fence.  But over the past couple of seasons, these plants have been so trampled each spring by children who climb up the rock wall and jump, that although the green shoots still spring up, the plants are stunted and the flowers no longer bloom. As an adult in the environment, how do I decide what it more important?  Where do I set the border/boundary? When we make borders, what lives are we paying attention to and what lives are we not valuing? This yard is a place where things live and die: tiger lilies get trampled, animals make homes that are removed, leaves get picked, and ants get stepped on. Because we have a “natural playground” – and because squirrels, rats, raccoons, trees, moss, wasps, and snails live here – we can ask certain questions.  Even more, because we are part of this place, we have to ask certain questions. We have an ethical responsibility to think about how our human moving is entangled with the possibilities that other lives have for moving in the yard. How does our moving activate our ethical and political choices to pay attention to certain lives and not others? Is it more important to let the children test their skills and explore, climb and jump wherever they want?  Or do I teach a responsibility to care with these plants and flowers? In noticing how our moving is entangled with the yard, the familiar idea that the yard is a space just (or primarily) for children’s skill development becomes unsettled. What happens when we pay attention together with children to how movement connects us within a place? How can we notice how human movements impact plants and flowers – and, how plants and flowers shape human moving. How can we figure out how to move together? 

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