Never too late for play time

Just before Easter holidays started at Eureka! one of our local schools visited with their 7–11 year-old (Key Stage 2) pupils. They were from a village school in Cheshire so it was a smaller group, with only about thirty children in total.

Children pretend to be cashiers and customers
in the Bank, Sept. 2009.

Once inside the museum, it was hard to move the children on from the Town Square! They were having a whale of a time dressing up as postal workers and delivering parcels to the bank, the shop, the garage and the ‘Dig’, our miniature archaeological site. They went shopping, worked the tills and even stacked shelves in the miniature Marks and Spencers. At the bank some kids filled out withdrawal forms, handing them over to classmates in cashiers’ jackets, who then had to decide whether or not to give them a PIN. There were several keen mechanics in the garage, while the petrol pump attendants also worked very hard at their own jobs.

As we watched the children thoroughly enjoy themselves—and helped them use their Eureka! cash cards in our very special cash machine so that they could collect Eureka! bank notes with characters such as Scoot the Robot or Orby the Alien incorporated in the design —we had a chance to talk with the four teachers chaperoning the class. They said that, after observing the children’s obvious enthusiasm, they had made an unanimous decision to re-introduce role playing into their school’s Key Stage 2 curriculum.

This is exactly the reason I love working at Eureka! I believe 100% in our ‘learning through play’ philosophy and it always delights me when our ideas are taken up by other education professionals. I know, as does any parent, that all children are full of curiosity from the moment they are born and take enormous pleasure from learning. They begin questioning almost as soon as they can talk. Learning is fun – and good teachers, both formal and informal, should be doing their best to keep it that way. I’m extremely happy that at least one set of Key Stage 2 children will be finding that some of the fun they experienced here will be following them back to school.

Jill Ward is an Enabler at Eureka! The National Children’s Museum