Not too old

The end is in sight! Of school that is. Nearly everyone is done with their math books for the year. Normally, when someone has finished a math or grammar book, I just have them move on to the next one. But with the end for all of them coming so near to the end of the school year, we will just start fresh in the fall. We'd have to go back to refresh anyway, so it doesn't make sense to start new ones right now. We have four more chemistry lessons and then we are done with that study and Greece we finished a couple of weeks ago, though they are still rehearsing their play for Sunday. This means we are starting in on our architecture study, which will be nice because it is so different from what we are doing, and is more art-based which will be nice for the end of the school year. 

To begin our architecture study, as a bridge to what we've already learned, we have started with the Seven Wonders of the World, both ancient and modern, then we will cover the highlights (it will be pretty cursory) of some important buildings from the middle ages, renaissance, and early modern period before diving into modern architecture and architects. 

Today was the bridge between the wonders and our cursory survey of other historical buildings. To that end we watched quite a few videos today which are part of an architecture art lesson. It's an art lesson aimed at middle schoolers which focuses on famous buildings and was perfect for what we were doing. We saw unusual buildings, famous buildings, and a really interesting video showing the comparable heights of them all up to the Burj Khalifa and beyond. Everyone really enjoyed it, especially since we had been working with some of the ancient buildings for a while now (both in our 'round the world trip and the last two years of history). 

I was thrilled that everyone was so engaged and excited because that bodes well for the next month. Here is what really interested me, though. The second we had finished watching the videos and I announced school was done, everyone made a beeline for the loft. I didn't think much of it because there is often long-term block play going on up there, so this would not be unusual. They kept calling for me to come up and look, which I finally did. In response to the videos, they had constructed a very tall block skyscraper which they were building and playing with. (And 11 - 15 year olds are quite capable of building very tall block buildings!) They were all quite content to do this for the next hour or so.

I had quite a few emotions over this. I was thrilled that they were so engaged in what we were learning about that it came out in their play. It is always a good sign that they are working on really understanding something and it was a nice switch from Percy Jackson and Star Wars. I was also incredibly thankful that all of them still felt safe enough to respond by playing. So often play is seen as something little kids do that older kids miss out on something really vital and important for making sense of the world. And after all that, I felt some real grief that this should be so. No child should miss out on open-ended play and no one should put a limit on how old is too old to engage in such play. 

Why do we make our children grow up so fast? They will get there regardless and how much better to enjoy the process. Parents get so focused on the outcome that they forget to see what is happening right in front of them. My view is probably a  little colored by D. sharing with today about a young man with excellent grades, test scores, impressing experiences at the national level, was on sports teams... really everything we tell high schoolers they need to do in order to get into a selective college and be successful in life. This young man was not accepted to any of the schools he applied to. I can't imagine how devastating that must be, not only to navigate the rejection but to realize that the world isn't the conveyor belt as was promised. It's a lot for an eighteen year old to take in. 

There is so much more to learning, heck, there is so much more to life than getting the grades, knuckling down, taking the tests, getting ahead. Taking time to play allows us to not take life quite so seriously, to pause and breathe, to see a broader picture and try out new ideas and ways of being. Truly, we are never too old to do this. Adult play may not always look like children's play, but is just as essential, we just don't always realize it. Imagine if children grew up not thinking that play was just for children and never quite lost the ability; imagine being an adult and never having to relearn how to play again. Just imagine...