Teacher TOM: All I knew to do was, okay, I’m gonna try to create that childhood that I had as a boy. I’m going to do the best I can to create that, that sense of freedom, that sense of kids playing together.
Rusty Keeler: Hi, this is Rusty Keeler and you’re listening to the Play Nature Podcast where we talk about play nature, playing in nature. And the nature of play. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s have a listen.
Alright, well I’m glad you’re here and I am excited for you to hear this conversation with teacher Tom, Tom Hobs. Let me tell you that we got into so many fun topics and you know, we get excited about all this stuff just like you, that the conversation was so long and detailed that I’m splitting it into two parts.
We’ll have two episodes with teacher Tom Hobson plus the slideshow, which is a real treat because we look at, uh, some of the amazing scenes and sites and experiences in his junk playground at his school in Seattle. So lots to look forward to. Here is part one of my conversation with teacher Tom. Hi Tom.
Hi Rusty. Thanks for having me. Hey, great to see you. It’s good to see you too. It’s been a long time. It has. It has. But good to see your smiling face and I’m excited to chat. And so I thought I’ll start by reading your bio and then we can, we can get into the conversation here. Teacher Tom Hobson is an early childhood educator, international speaker, education consultant.
Teacher of teachers, parent, educator, and author. He’s best known for his namesake blog teacher. Tom’s blog, where is posted Daily since 2009 for nearly two decades, teacher Tom was the sole employee of the Woodland Park Cooperative School. A parent owned and operated school, knit together by teacher Tom’s Democratic progressive, play-based pedago.
He’s the producer of teacher Tom’s Play Summit and delivers professional development courses for early childhood educators and parents of young children. He has authored two books, aptly named teacher Tom’s first book, and teacher Tom’s second book, respectively. He is also the host of the podcast, teacher Tom’s podcast, taking play seriously.
Yeah, there he is. That’s, that’s him. That’s the man.
Teacher TOM: Oh God. I, I sometimes regret naming the titling the books that teacher Tom’s first book and teacher Tom’s second book, because I just, it was recently, I was so proud. There was somebody, you know, had me in their, they wrote about me in their dissertation.
They used quotes from my books.
Rusty Keeler: Yes.
Teacher TOM: Right in their dissertation. And then you go through the index and it just says, teacher Tom’s first book as the citation. It didn’t sound academic at all.
Rusty Keeler: Well, uh, well, the, the, you balance it. You, you have, you know, you’re, you’re steeped in, you know, the real knowledge, you know, the, the academic world of like, okay, you can talk about why play is important and all that from that.
And then you also have the heart and the spirit and about it all. And I think that’s why, why people love you, you know, and what you talk about and what you share. Alright, well thank, yeah. You know, the first time I heard about you was when I was doing the, an Australian speaking tour and I was just coming off the heels of you doing an Australian speaking tour with the same, with the same folks.
So I was.
Teacher TOM: Yeah, no, it would, that’s, that’s really a cool experience too, to go to be in another country. ’cause I’ve been there several times now, but, you know, sometimes I’ll be there for three weeks or even five weeks one time. And it’s, it’s really fun to, to really immerse yourself in another culture like that and see what they’re doing in early childhood.
’cause I learned a great deal from what they’re up to and their attitudes and their opinions about things. So, yeah. And it’s, it’s always fun though to, to find out that, you know, rusty was just before me or just after me coming into a place. Mm-hmm. And I know what you talked about. And I can either, I can, uh, I have to avoid certain topics or, or riff
Rusty Keeler: on it.
Yep. I riff on it. I just, I just steal your stuff.
Teacher TOM: If you were before me, then I can’t steal
Rusty Keeler: it. That’s right. That’s right. Oh, what’d Tom say? Oh my gosh. Well, yeah. Well, so why don’t we, why don’t we just start about, you know, play. Play and, and for that, you know, I, I talk about like the nature of play. What is the nature of play and what, you know, what is it for childhood and development and the, the spirit, the soul, and, and our role as adults in it.
That’s kind of the next subject, but Yeah.
Teacher TOM: Right. Yeah. Right. Well, you know, I mean, I would start with the adult role by saying we should stay out of it as much as possible.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: Mm-hmm. Um, you know, I, I think a lot about. The way I like to connect people to play is to just, you know, think about my own childhood, right?
I mean, I grew up, I was born in 1962, so that those early years were the sixties, early seventies, suburban Columbia, South Carolina, and you know. We had a TV set. It was black and white, and it had like one show that we wanted to watch, so that wasn’t a distraction for us. But mom couldn’t plunk us down in front of there too either.
So she would just say, you know, she’d say, you’re driving me crazy. Go outside. And as young as four years old, that’s what you did. You went, you, you went outside, you’d hear the door click behind you. Mm-hmm. And some of my friends have told me, they even heard the door lock behind. Yep. You’d go outside and the first thing you’d do is, you know, you’d be out there on the front of your house, right out there on the street, and you’d start looking for other kids.
You didn’t look for toys, you didn’t look for entertainment, you were just looking for other kids. ’cause you wanted to connect with those other human beings that were somewhat like, you didn’t care if they were boys, you didn’t care if they were girls. You didn’t care if they’re older than you or younger than you, whatever kids were outside.
And if you didn’t see any kids, what’d you do? You start walking up and down the street knocking on the doors. Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. Can Johnny come out and play? Can Lisa come out and play?
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: And you know, right there, I think about four year olds in today’s world, that would just be a bizarre experience.
Right? Mm-hmm. And then you’d end up having a conversation with all their parents. So you were getting to know, you know, Mr. Sa would say, well, John, you know, John’s being punished. I can’t let him come outside today, so, mm-hmm. But, you know, you would still sit there and have a chat with him, but I, you know, come on in, I’ll give you some cookies or something like that.
And you’d just have this incredible experience where you’d go outside, you didn’t have toys, you didn’t, you had a lot of time. There weren’t what? You weren’t scheduled. There was very little adult supervision. Right. I mean, that we were aware of. Now, I’m gonna say that maybe in the spirit of play work, the parents, usually it was a mom back then.
You know, they may well have been watching out the windows. Right. They may be in it when they’re in there in the kitchen washing the, because mom just wanted to get her housework done, so she got us out of the house.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: And so, you know, so it was unsupervised. We didn’t have any toys. We had lots of time.
We were outside and, and you would just flow from one thing to the next and, and really you, you had to learn a lot of lessons your own way. I mean, at one point, I’ll never forget, recognizing the fact that if somebody got hurt. If somebody scraped their knee or something like that, the last thing you wanted to do was get an adult involved.
Mm mm-hmm. Because the adults would immediately like scuttle the game. They’d say, well, don’t play that anymore.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
Teacher TOM: And so I started doing things like before I’d go outside, I would go, I’d fill my pocket with bandaids.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You know,
Teacher TOM: I’d go into the medicine cabin, I’d go, because, you know, I didn’t know about washing ’em off or anything, but you know, as soon as a kid got hurt, you’d say your mom won’t know.
Your mom will never notice, and you put a bandaid on it, you try to keep playing. ’cause the adults were sort of the ones that were there to tell us when we couldn’t do stuff. So we, we kind of kept them off our radar as much as possible.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And
Teacher TOM: so to me, what I like, the reason I like to tell the story that way is to me that was kind of, I think that’s what Peter Gray calls that too.
The golden age of childhood play. That was an era when being a good parent meant that’s what you did today. Parenting is a much different animal. I mean, you’re arrested if you do that with your kids now, and that’s shocking to me to think just in my lifetime, in my 62 years, how much things have changed.
But children haven’t changed. They still need that, that freedom. Because to me, that’s what it is. It’s the childhood freedom to ask and answer your own questions, because that’s what play is all the time. It’s always asking questions about, can I do this? Uh, what happens if I do that? It’s all trial and error science.
It’s doing basic mathematics, right? You’re sitting there and you know you’re, who’s in, who’s out? What’s more, what’s less? All of this kind of stuff. All of these things that we think you have to learn in school. Literacy. Right? Because all the dramatic play, the storytelling play that you did mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Was all, I mean, we know from research that the kids who play those, you know, storytelling games are the ones who, who most easily learn how to read. Then later, when that time comes, at seven or eight years old, when it’s normal to start learning to read. So for me, play is the foundation. Play is the time when we learn to be self-motivated.
Because I think the, the word that we, we maybe if I wanna be more, you know, impress some academic people, I don’t call it play-based learning, I call it self-directed learning. And because it’s, that’s kind of what, you know, we all know that that’s what adults do, right? As a, as an adult, if I wanna learn something, I don’t go to, I don’t, I mean, maybe I’ll sign up for a class, but nobody’s forced me into it.
But I’ll go find a YouTube video. I mean, I’m making the best baguettes. On Earth right now from New York Times YouTube videos. That’s right. Bakery town. You know, I could have gone to culinary school for, you know, four or five years and, and done the same thing. So anyway, that’s my point. The self-directed learning.
Yeah, I think we self-motivated through our, that foundation of play. We learned to work well with others. Like I said, the first thing you do is look for other kids.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: And part of that is the conflict. Part of that is the bickering. Part of that is the negotiating and figuring things out. And I think this one is one that, uh, you know, I think is to me is really important, is being personable.
Speaker 3: Hmm.
Teacher TOM: Because those are the traits of successful people in life. Uh, and I’m not about financially successful.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: I’m talking about having friends, having, having colleagues, having successful marriages and relationships, uh, having work that’s satisfying. We were, before we started recording, you and I were talking about the satisfaction of our work, and I think a lot of that you, it’s hard to find that when you don’t have that kind of background, that foundation of play.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. You find your voice. Find your voice out there among, among the group. And people may, may, may be getting along and you might not always get along, or there might be, you know, different people each time and Yeah. Or you have to be creative and, you know, come up with your own play, your own games, your own adventures and, and negotiated and, yeah.
And I think you’re also, as you find your voice, you’re, you’re finding out who you are and, and your interests and how you fit with the group. Too and the group meaning the world in general. Yeah.
Teacher TOM: Wouldn’t that be great if what we thought of as, I mean, ’cause you know, I, I know you’re not an educator or you are an educator, but not in the same way I am having been in a preschool, we always talk about what’s the purpose of school, right?
And, and so often people just think it’s about getting a job and, you know, vocational training is maybe a piece of it at some level, but not in the early years. Not when you’re talking preschool. It really, to me, it should be about finding your purpose. Like you were just saying, finding a, knowing how to find your purpose for a day, for an hour, for a week, for a year, for a month, for a life.
Um, there’s so many great stories about, uh, of that where you, if you learn how to pursue a passion and live according to your. Purpose in life. Um, that’s what gives life meaning.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you need a little space like that. Sometimes you have to listen, you have to find out who that is.
Teacher TOM: Right. That’s why that having no unstructured time.
Right. Having that, that, that sweep of time that we used to have when our moms would send us outside. Mm-hmm. To me, that’s why that’s so absolute. That’s the key part, is to not be scheduled all the time. To have everything. And, and it, you know, I know we’ve replaced that outside play with a lot of. Classes, a lot of, you know, you go to soccer and then you go to piano, and then you go to ballet and you go do all of these activities.
And the kids, I mean, I’m not saying the kids are saying, I don’t wanna do it. But where’s the free time to just, uh, sort of piddle to fart around as Kurt Baugh gets said?
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Have those, that space, that spaciousness that time to,
Teacher TOM: yeah.
Rusty Keeler: To kind of, so to
Teacher TOM: me that’s, that’s the core of why play, childhood play is so important.
Um, it has to be self-selected. It can’t be like PE classes where the, you know, we call it playing, playing baseball. Right. But there’s two different kinds of baseball. There’s the kind of baseball that I did when I was a guy when I hit little league where nine players per team, everybody puts on the uniform, your bases a certain way apart.
And then there’s kind of baseball that I played before Little League, which was, you know, that car is first base. And that old license plate will be second base, and that shrub is third base. And, and, you know, and, and you had kids, you had maybe four people per team or three people, and you had four year olds and 12 year olds all playing together.
And that game then becomes a game of negotiation, of creativity, of including others. Right. Because as the 10-year-old, when the 4-year-old came to bat, nobody had to tell you to throw it softer to the 4-year-old. You just knew
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Teacher TOM: That
Speaker 3: if
Teacher TOM: you wanted that game to happen. You had to give the 4-year-old a chance.
Mm-hmm. So you’d pick, toss it underhand. Then when one of the other 10 year olds came up, you’d try to get ’em out. And it became a game of, of a collaboration and cooperation rather than competition. Which I think is one of the things young children in particularly naturally gravitate to. The
Rusty Keeler: cooperative.
Teacher TOM: Yeah. The cooperative game. How do we keep this game going? I Peter Gray points that out as one of the greatest motivators drivers of play is, is to keep the game going.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. And that’s
Teacher TOM: why we didn’t want the adults getting involved because they would stop the game. I’ll never forget Mr. S watching his older son John, and we were playing tackle football and the rest of us were maybe, what, six years old?
And John was probably eight or nine years old and he was just rolling us down. He was just running right over us. Usually we didn’t care ’cause it took, like we had to cooperate. It would take like five of us to tackle him. But one day Mr. Sein saw that and he came outside and he banned tackle football for the whole neighborhood.
Mm. And you could do that back then You could ban. And then he went inside and he tore strips of a sheet and he taught us how to play flag football.
Rusty Keeler: Okay. Okay. So what happened
Teacher TOM: is we started playing flag football in Mr. Sand’s front yard. And then we would go one block over to play tackle football. So we didn’t That’s right.
Rusty Keeler: That’s right. That’s right. See, creative problem solving.
Teacher TOM: Creative problem solving. Well, and I think that’s the beauty of it too. That’s the beauty of the village. There’s a place for everything, right? Mm-hmm. You realize, oh, this place is not for that kind of game. Mm-hmm. This place over here, the other people don’t care, so we can play it over there.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: So, learning about your environment is a, I think, a really important part of being able to move around in space to go beyond just being in classroom walls or a backyard.
Rusty Keeler: Uhhuh, I mean, you’re talking about having autonomy.
Teacher TOM: Yep. Uh, having, uh, physical autonomy. Absolutely. And just choice about what you’re gonna do.
I mean, to me, that’s what it is, right? I mean, it’s self-selected activities really. That’s kind of how I look at it, because that’s the bottom line of what play is all about.
Rusty Keeler: Okay. Okay. So with that, what kind of environments did you create when you were a teacher, when you were leading, you know that, that amazing place out there, uh,
Teacher TOM: in Seattle?
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Teacher TOM: Yeah. I started, okay. So my school is a cooperative school. Okay. And the only reason I became a teacher. I had no, no training in it, no background in it. I have a degree in journalism. I, so I, that hence the writing a little bit. That’s ah,
Speaker 3: yeah. Right.
Teacher TOM: Okay. I reported on the classroom as where the blog came from.
Right. Ah, that’s good.
Speaker 3: Um,
Teacher TOM: but, but when it started off, I was a stay at home parent. Okay. And, uh, and, you know, and I had just expected, okay, stay at a parent. I’m gonna give my child the same kind of upbringing that I had. The truth is, is the world had changed so much and I hadn’t been quite aware of that ’cause childhood had been off of my radar for until I was in my, until I was 30 years old.
In my thirties, I suddenly realized there are no kids in the neighborhoods anymore. They’re all in preschool. They’re all in, they’re all in care of some kind. And so it was like I’d go to parks and like it’d be me and my daughter and that’s it. There was nobody else there to go play in the playgrounds and stuff.
And every once in a while you’d be so happy there’d be one other kid there. And I was talking to a mom one time and, and she started telling me about her kid was in a preschool called a Cooperative preschool. And that means that the parents go to school with their kids. And so suddenly then my, my wife and my mother-in-law and my mother, those three most powerful women in my life who did not want me to enroll her in a preschool because she had a stay at home parent, they allowed me to enroll her in co-op if I went with her.
That’s right. Okay. And so, and so. I was like, all, and you know, and who care? That was fun. I mean, it, it, you’re just suddenly you’re you, I discovered the underside of tables again. I had forgotten. ’cause you know, two year olds are always crawling under table. Sure, sure. And, and I suddenly found myself down there with the children and having all these images of my, and I realized, wait a minute.
My childhood that di might be, might not be available to my daughter right now in the way that I had it. Mm-hmm. But it can still happen in our settings if we allow it to happen in our more structured places like that. And I was lucky that her teacher was a, was a real master teacher, a woman named Chris David.
She really understood what a play-based program should be all about and. By the time, you know, I was there for three years going almost every day learning about what it was like to be in, I don’t know anything about standard preschools sitting at desks or, or all of that stuff. I don’t know any of that stuff.
I don’t know any of the book learned stuff about early years while I have now. I know it now, but by osmosis, just by living it. But back then I didn’t know any of it. And teacher Chris said to me one day when, when Josephine was five, she goes, uh, what are you gonna do when she goes to kindergarten and. I had no idea.
’cause I had been a freelance writer up to then, and I was thinking, I don’t know if I want to go back to sitting in front of a computer all day long. You know, I, I wanted, I really enjoyed this. And she just said to me, she said, you should be a preschool teacher.
Rusty Keeler: Ah.
Teacher TOM: And so I went and did a little coursework, but I got hired at the Woodland Park Cooperative School before I was done with any kind of degree or anything.
And, uh, and so all I knew to do was, okay, I’m gonna try to create. That childhood that I had as a boy, I’m going to do the best I can to create that, that sense of freedom, that sense of kids playing together. And as a co-op, you know, I could have easily become a real command to control kind of place. ’cause we’d have 20 kids and sometimes we’d have 10 adults in the room.
Mm-hmm. You know, it could have very easily been the adults taking the place over. Wow. But I tried to conceive of it as I would tell these adults. Who I was supposed to be teaching how to be teachers as well. I would tell them, I want you to be the moms in the kitchen windows. Keep an eye on the kids. Hmm.
Once they’ve left, you can tidy stuff up, but not before, you know, because it’s really hard not to tidy stuff up. Yeah. Especially the dorms. And then I started, I started thinking about, well, our outdoor space was really bad at where we happened to be. Our school was in a basement of a church and we had this slab of asphalt and that was kind of it.
And we would throw a bunch of toys out there and, and the kids would go outside and, and one day. I was out there and there was a bunch of stick ponies and things like that, balls and things like that out there. And all 20 kids had found this place where they went up these stairs and there was a covered area.
And the echoes, the sound was really loud and they were all screaming at the top, top of their lungs. And they did it for like a half an hour. Yeah, yeah. And that’s when I thought, I gotta come up with something better for these kids. So, so that’s when I started doing, uh, started what we did, the what I called the little world experiment.
And so I decided to start taking indoor things outdoors. So the first thing was the, the dollhouse. I thought, well, a dollhouse, let’s start creating the outdoors as a dollhouse. So I started, so I went and got a lot of little figurines and things like that, but then I went out and I had to, at this time, I had to go and source natural materials for the playground.
So I went and got sticks and rocks and pine cones and tree bark and moss, and just all kinds of things like that. And eventually. We covered all of the asphalt with wood chips and we had, and it basically looked like a little woodland setting by the end.
Speaker 3: Hmm. And
Teacher TOM: then we started thinking, okay, well what are some of the, we need kids a chance to create outside, well, the blocks were inside, so let’s, hey, I got an idea.
Let’s create a work bench, you know? And I started off with, okay, hammers and nails, and these were preschoolers. And I had never, you know, I’d kind of heard, I knew Montessori did a little bit of this kind of stuff, but I’d never seen what. I, I didn’t know how to do it.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: Oh, you know, all the nerves, everything else.
I thought, okay, they’re gonna kill each other with hammers and nails. Mm-hmm. So I got a tree stump. We had a tree stump out there, and I would, I put caution codes around it, made it a safety area. Okay. One period at a time, got to come in there and I would start a nail and they got to hold the hammer. Put on eye protection.
Yeah. Then I would hold their hand as they did it and let them hammer the nail in. Okay, well, you know, and so that’s how I started. But within a few months I started realizing, realizing I could trust these kids. They understood that this was an inherently dangerous activity.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: They knew that somebody could get hurt.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: They knew that wearing eye protection was important. I’ll never forget one of the boys, he kept coming over where we were hammering without, and he wouldn’t put on the eye protection. I said, well, I can’t let you be here without the eye protection. Uh, because you know, you don’t want to go blind.
And he was like, I don’t want to. I don’t want to. And this other boy who was hammering his father was a contractor, so he kind of knew a little bit what he was doing. And he goes, he said to this other kid, he goes, you have to wear safety goggles, because sometimes, and then he whacked the nail and it went flying through the air.
He said, sometimes they take off like rockets. Yep. That other kid put on safety goggles after that. Yeah. Yeah. And so then, you know, then we graduated to, to saws and drills and even some power tools. We had power drills. Uh, we were using, you know, the vibration sanders and things like that. And so we had our, we had a little workshop area, and then we had, then we needed, you know, a digging area.
We realized that kids needed a chance to like change their landscape and their environment. So we created a small little, but we called it a full body sandpit. Because all they had before was like a sensory table where they stood and they, they just had to dig with their hands, right? It was not, they couldn’t get their bodies in there and do the whole thing.
Then we realized there was nothing growing out there, so we commandeered a section and we created a little garden, just a planter garden kind of thing, and then we got to move to our new space. That’s the one that you know that, that you’re probably most familiar with. Uhhuh. We moved to the Fremont Baptist Church.
Okay. We got there in their side yard there, and Pastor Gay was there and she goes, you can have the side yard, but you can’t do it. She goes, my congregation’s a little concerned about the kind of junkyard playground that it seems like you want to create. And uh, and, and, and then we negotiated with her and, and we realized that the secret was to build a high fence.
Rusty Keeler: No, nothing behind that fence. Nothing to look at. People couldn’t see it from the street. It is a beautiful fence. Yeah.
Teacher TOM: And the congregation could still see it from inside the church. And she would, and she said that they would stand in there every, every Sunday. They’d look out there and we weren’t there.
It’s how do they play out there? There are no toys out there. There are no, there are no, there’s no pla, there’s no slides, there’s no merry-go-round. And then I started fighting about, about the anarchy zone and places like that, that got me inspired. Mm-hmm. And we started, we started realizing that, you know, we could, we could have our workshop area, our work bench, where the kids could saw and hammer and do stuff.
We could have an, an area where, where art, messy art, I mean outdoors. Once you go outdoors. There’s nobody worrying about paint on the walls.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You
Teacher TOM: know, once you’re outside it’s, you know, it’s like paint can get everywhere. It doesn’t matter. Hose the kids down at the end, you know, skin is washable. Right?
That’s right. And then we went from that full body. The full body sand pit became like half the playground. We got, we had three dump truck loads brought in. Yes. One of the boys was there and he, he heard our plans. He goes, he goes, no, I think we should have a two level sandpit. So there was, there was an upper level and then a, then there was a, like this concrete slope built there to like, for erosion control.
There was a lower level and we did the sandpit that went from the top to the bottom. Yeah. Standard pump at the top. So, you know, ’cause we knew that they could pump water, then they could dig these rivers that would just flow. Oh
Rusty Keeler: man. Yeah. You know,
Teacher TOM: we learned a lot about erosion.
Rusty Keeler: Yep. Yeah. And this was
Teacher TOM: the beauty about being a co-op is that, so all our sand is at the top of the hill and it’s, you know, eroding down the hill like that.
And we create, we, I kept trying to come up with all kinds of contraptions that we could build that would encourage the kids to bring the sand back to the top uhhuh. And we had wheelbarrows and all this kind of stuff, but, you know, and sometimes, you know, they would take it on for a while. But I don’t like to boss kids around.
Right. I like to let ’em play.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Teacher TOM: And so what we would do is three times a year we would have a parent work party cooperative. There you
Rusty Keeler: go. Yep.
Teacher TOM: Come
Rusty Keeler: on.
Teacher TOM: Parents, the main job was to get the shovels and the wheelbarrows, and you had to haul the sand back to the top, and it was such a great community building activity.
Yeah,
Speaker 3: yeah. Because
Teacher TOM: the parents that were out there, they, they, they were taking part in creating this playground for themselves and, you know. Yeah. And seeing why, and they would then have their own ideas about what we could do. I never forget, one parent goes, you know, this is a great space, but there’s no flat places out here.
There’s no place to, like, there’s nothing flat, there’s no place to write a trike or anything like that. And, and we never created the trike, but we built a state. He, he said he brought, got a bunch of the other dads together and they built a stage for us in one corner of the play game. Yeah. Yeah. And it was cool because he brought his, uh, he was, he was another contractor and he brought a, a jackhammer.
Ooh. And, and so and so we, the kids got to watch him jackhammer out part of their playground and that was, that was a blast. And that’s, I learned about this is when we’re doing this stuff, is, I always made sure we tried to do as much of it as possible. Not on the weekends, but while the kids were there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So they could, so when the dump truck came. We were all there watching the guy and you know for sure, yeah. Pumping all that sand and them telling the dump truck driver where to put the sand more over here, more over there. So we ended up with that full space and the only traditional playground equipment we kept were the swings.
Uh, we kept, we had, they had two old, really old swings, the kind with the straps. They, and they had a, like a trapeze bar was on this swing set, which I don’t think they let you do anymore, you know? ’cause it was right at the forehead level. Oh yeah.
Rusty Keeler: There you go. Yeah.
Teacher TOM: But we still, you know, it’s still there. I know it’s still on the playground, so I’m not worried about that.
Then we ended up, then there was one end of the swing set where we could hang like a tire. Or we, we actually hung a shipping pallet there for a while as a swing. Just kind of whatever the kids came up with for a swing, we’d hang it up there for a while and let ’em swing on it.
Rusty Keeler: Get that movement in there.
Yeah, exactly. And then
Teacher TOM: as time went on, you know, it’s one of the, uh, sorry, I’m just rambling here. You could stop me at any time. No, never. But this is, the stories to me are, so that’s what makes it special to me is how it came together because. The parents got into it. Right. And so the parents suddenly they realized anytime they were cleaning out a basement or Or a cellar.
Or an attic, and they found something. You know, like one mom, she found all her old swimming trophies, you know, her honorable mention and Oh, and patient trophies from when she was a girl on. Yeah. You know, she was gonna throw ’em out. But those were the best thing on the playground. We just threw ’em out there on the playground and suddenly, oh
Rusty Keeler: my gosh.
Yes. He’s got a
Teacher TOM: billion things to do with these. Yeah. Um, another dad, another dad, he was a hobbyist, a motorcycle hobbyist, and he had this old box of old, uh, motorcycle rear view mirrors. Oh, that he was just gonna throw out, well, not only treasures,
Rusty Keeler: treasures,
Teacher TOM: brilliant treasures. And not only that, but they’re shatterproof glass.
Ah, they’re built for. So the kids could just do anything they wanted with them and it was,
Speaker 3: oh
Teacher TOM: yeah. They couldn’t break them. And they, you know, and we actually learned how to start fires with those where you reflect. You know, in the sunny days you would start little fires and stuff. We would do that takes a lot of patience.
Rusty Keeler: Oh my gosh.
Oh my gosh.
Teacher TOM: No, no kid ever succeeded at doing it, Mike.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that would take, you’d have to spend a lot of time. But, but, but it is possible kids.
Teacher TOM: And with the magnifying glasses, same thing as you. You got the magnifiers out and we could get smoke going every once in a while.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Teacher TOM: But, uh.
You know, you said, you told me you’ve been in Australia. It’s uh, those kids down there, those, they, a lot of those schools that I’ve been to, they actually teach the children how to make fires. Oh yeah, yeah. They have fire pit. A lot of the schools, I mean, it’s part of the curriculum a lot of times. I’ll never forget going to, uh, one of the schools in Manley, I think it was in Queensland, and uh, and the kid, the kid said to me, he’s five years old, he said, I’m gonna make a fire.
You wanna watch? And I’m like, I looked for the teacher. The teacher’s like, yeah, go with him. And I’m like. You’re just gonna send me up out with a five-year-old by myself to, and we went out there and he was, it was so great to watch him and he cleared off the space and created this space with no debris around it.
He got rocks and fire circle around, you know, to kinda hold it. Yeah. He built a perfect little kindling set up and everything. And then he had, he had one of those, um, flint things, you know, where you strike. Oh. And he took a cotton ball and he stuck it in Vaseline, which is pure petroleum. Put that underneath there.
Just sparked it till it started. Mm-hmm. We watched the fire burn for a little while before he started. He got a bucket of water. He had a bucket of water there. He knew everything about fire safety.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Teacher TOM: And we can’t do
Rusty Keeler: that
Teacher TOM: in the
Rusty Keeler: States.
Teacher TOM: But anyway, uh, we, I, that was one thing I could never convince the parents to allow me to do at our preschool was, was have a regular fire on the playground.
So what we would do is two or three times a year, we would close the school for a day. And we would all meet at a fire pit at a local park. Hmm. And we would all bring things we wanted to burn and the parents would all come. And as a community, we’d have these big bonfires in the, in the community place.
So the kids at least got the experience of being safer on fire, learning about fire. You know, it’s one of the basic elements.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And so
Teacher TOM: it’s not something that a lot of people wanna hear about. You know, educators these days. But the truth is it’s an, you know, people think, well, why do you need to learn about fire?
What about Jacko Leonards? What about birthday candles? What about fireplaces? What about grills? There’s so many ways we play with fire in our world. Mm-hmm. We might not need it that much anymore. Campfires? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um. It’s important for children to see this.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. It’s, it’s human, it’s ancient. It’s, it’s in our, it’s in our DNA being around fires and connected back to it and our survival.
Yeah. It was,
Teacher TOM: so that’s, and then, then of course the garden, I realized one of the things we did is make sure the garden was the centerpiece of our playground. Okay. Right at the center of the playground. We had a, I had a hard time ’cause gardens on the ground are tough. ’cause two year olds just, it’s, if you’re not gonna boss ’em around, they’re gonna run right through.
The seedlings.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Teacher TOM: Yeah. They’re gonna pull everything up by the roots. So, uh, and gardening has always been a challenge with young children. So what we did was, uh, uh, we did planting beds, which sort of were a little, just high enough that it wasn’t natural for a two or 3-year-old to get into it. They still crawled into it sometimes, but they had other places to crawl and climb.
So it wasn’t that big a deal. And then we learned that, uh, you know, you’ve got to accept the fact that you’re never gonna get a crop of rip berries. Every berry is gonna get picked while it’s still Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re gonna get, you’re never gonna get strawberries because they get harvested as flowers.
Rusty Keeler: Aw, that’s true. They’re beautiful little flowers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know,
Teacher TOM: kids come up with this tiny little bouquet of, of, of straw blossoms, and you said, well, that’s the whole crop of strawberries for this year. So that’s why we ended up building a greenhouse. The parent community, we worked, worked together and built a greenhouse.
Oh, on the other side of the school, on the other side of the building where the kids didn’t have access or they didn’t have free access. And so we grew a mirror, we mirrored everything. We were growing on the preschool playground. We grew in the greenhouse, and so that way we could have things become ripe.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. Yeah.
Teacher TOM: And then we could bring them over in pots and say, this is what they would become.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah.
Teacher TOM: This is what those green berries would’ve been. This, or asparagus or anything like that. We would bring it over and for the kids, and then the older kids went over to the greenhouse and helped us with the actual gardening and the maintenance of everything, but, mm.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: So that was, that was, uh, I’m proud of that. We created that urban gar, that urban preschool garden.
Rusty Keeler: Love it. I love it. I love it. And then to be, be able to have all of it where kids are connecting with plants, say the whole, the whole way, but by playing with the plants at the beginning for the younger kids and, and picking the strawberry flowers and all that, that is, that is making a connection and an understanding that.
And then to go on, if. If you want. Well, it’s
Teacher TOM: one of the things, I think about this a lot ’cause a lot of the nature programs and things like that, which I love, I love people doing the nature programs, the cedar songs out there, and the other programs and the timber nooks and all that kinda stuff. Great stuff.
Rusty Keeler: Okay, I gotta break in. So that’s it. We’re gonna pause right there, uh, for part one of the conversation with teacher Tom, I hope you liked it. Are you inspired? Are you ready to support more play in this kind of way? Yeah. So look for a slideshow with teacher Tom. When we look at all sorts of wild pictures and places, uh, and situations in his junk playground at his school.
And part two of the conversation with teacher Tom. And if you like this. Episode. If you like this podcast, hey, why don’t you share it with a friend? You know, somebody that might like it. Yeah, share it with them. That’d be great. Alright. Till next time.
Alright, thanks for listening. Do you have a comment or a question? Email me at Play Nature podcast@gmail.com. You know, I like talking about this stuff and maybe we could use your question on a future podcast episode. As always, I have some free goodies for you in the show notes, including my outdoor loose parts guide, fun stuff in there.
And so I wish you the best in your outdoor play adventures. And when it comes to adding nature to your yard or loose parts or saying yes to risky play, my favorite motto is dream big, start small and never stop. Oh yeah. Woo, woo, woo. Let’s do it. All right. Have fun out there.
