Teacher TOM: This is my version of environmentalism. Instead of all of this junky plastic stuff, it lasts forever. Instead of just throwing it away, let’s give the kids one more chance to do something with it.
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 am glad you’re here. Let’s have a listen. Welcome to part two of my great conversation with teacher Tom Tom Hobson. So without further ado. Here we go. We’ll pick up where we left off.
Teacher TOM: But you know, we’re going out into nature and there’s that ethic of you don’t wanna destroy nature. Right. Well, when we were playing unsupervised, there was a certain amount of picking the bark off of trees. Mm-hmm. There was a certain amount of pulling plants up by the roots. There was a certain enough amount of saying, well these leaves are pretty, I’m gonna collect these, or these flowers are nice and collect these.
And like you just said though. It seems destructive. In our modern world, we think about it as destructive, and a lot of these nature programs talk about it as destructive, but that’s how you create the connection, is learning everything about a plant. You, I mean, when I say to a child, Hey, this plant is a carrot.
Where’s the carrot? It’s growing underground. What’s the next thing they’re gonna wanna do? Yes. They wanna pull it out and see the carrot.
Rusty Keeler: Yep. Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah, for sure, for sure. I know what a maple leaf feels like all seasons of the year because I’ve picked, make-believe, you know, as, as a child my whole life.
And, and, and I’ve, you know what the veins are because I’ve, you know, you pulled them, you know, even pulled them apart. Yeah. And, and that could be like, oh, is that destructive? Or is it making that connection, like understanding or seeing the patterns of, of the universe through that? Because you’re experiencing it and you’re pulling the, you know, the flowers off of a sunflower ahead.
Teacher TOM: Part of learning about things is taking ’em apart. I mean, that’s just, that’s a real big part of learning about the, and that doesn’t just go for na natural things. I know that one of the reasons that I call that playground at, with, at Woodland Park, the old junkyard playground, is I recognize that, you know, ’cause Oh, okay.
I, there was this one boy one time we had, we, we had all these, um, you know, so we had the, you know, the caution cones as orange caution cones. Yeah. Where it had the same type of thing, but there were big cylinders and sometimes you see those on construction sites. Oh yeah. Road work, and we had like three or four of those on the playground, and they have these weighted bottoms and I watched one boy, he’s carrying one, right?
These are big, sturdy things, but he, he’s carrying it across the playground. And then he, he stopped and he, he, he arranged it on the ground in a certain way. And I, I was just fascinated What’s he doing? And we had this giant crate that was, had been donated to us from a, a guy who buys art for a living. And this was a crate that had been built to protect some Dega sculpture or something.
And it was this incredible, the crate was great. I don’t know about this sculpture, uh, the crate. And he climbed up on this crate and he jumped off. And I just heard the crack. He broke this cylinder.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Teacher TOM: And so this was early in my teaching career, and I sort of, you know, I, I said, Henry, why’d you break that?
And he said, well, I wanted to, he, I said, what’d you do that for? And he said, well, I wanted to see if I could break it. And, you know, uh. Duh. Right. I mean that was a classic, you know, trial and error science experiment. Yeah. He had a question through his play. He answered it. Uh, he found out he could break it.
Yeah. I’ve had people tell me, no, those things are indestructible. They’re destructible. I watched a 5-year-old break. And it had been outside for a long time, so it was kind of brittle too. But you know, and I realized, and I kind of talked to him a little bit about property and part, you know, you know, you know, that kind of stuff.
Not destroying things. But now I’m really, I feel guilty about that now because that is part, a very important part of play. Sometimes play means destroying something. It means taking something all the way apart. And it’s not on purpose necessarily. It’s, it’s, in fact, often when a kid breaks something, they ball, they can’t, they can’t believe it happened and they ball.
But it’s an important part of understanding. You have to look at something from every single perspective, including as it’s being broken, before you can really understand that. And that’s what that hands-on learning is all about. Mm-hmm. And so for me, I think we, that’s why I love the idea of, I, I had a boy one time, he’d never been on our playground before, and, and he came up to me with a car that had no wheels on it.
So it was just the, a toy car and it was just this little plastic car with no wheels that he said. And he was verbally, he wasn’t quite there yet. He was like two or maybe two and a half. He said broken. And I said, yeah, it’s broken. And then I kind of joked and I just said, everything out here is broken. He thought that was funny.
So he took it as a challenge. He started trying to find something on our playground that wasn’t broken. He found a doll that the arm was missing. He found a, he found, you know, he found, uh, you know, all he found, he found like a xylophone that had some of the, the, you know, the keys taken off of it. Yeah. He found a ball that was deflated.
He, he, everything he found turned out there was some aspect of it that you would call broken. And then, and I started hunting with him too. ’cause I thought, well certainly there’s something out here that is Yeah. I didn’t really mean that. Everything. Yeah. Some of those trophies, almost every one of them, the, the figurehead had broken off the base.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Teacher TOM: Uh, everything was out there. I realized everything broken and then he held up a stick and he said, that’s not broken.
Rusty Keeler: Ah. Then
Teacher TOM: we all sat there for a second and we go, it broke off a tree. And then, and then the leads had come off a tree and then rocks have broken off of, you know, and we realized that every, then we realized that great truth.
Everything’s broken, and if it’s not broken now it’s gonna be broken.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Teacher TOM: That’s basic Buddhism.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. The glass
Teacher TOM: you’re, the glass you’re drinking out of is already broken, so appreciate it right now.
Rusty Keeler: That’s good. That’s good. Yeah.
Teacher TOM: Well, I realize that that was, it’s deep philosophy sometimes when you’re out there doing this stuff.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Well, okay, that’s a direction to go. But, but Well, let’s just, let’s just look at that. The, you know, so we we’re getting into the junk playground concept then. Yeah. Alright. Right. And so, you know, there’s a lot of, well-meaning amazing educators out there that want to create beautiful environments. Yeah.
And, you know, they, they get nice materials and, you know, we, there’s pictures of books and all this stuff and, and, and, and I love it. You wanna give children nice, you know, nice things. But that creates a very different perspective in the, in the adult mind of when they’re using things. Yeah. Versus the junk playground.
So, so what? Yeah. So how, what would you say to people like, you know that
Teacher TOM: Well that’s what that little world experiment I mentioned to you at the very, that started the whole experiment outside. Was it started. ’cause I would see, back then it was like Pinterest I think was the thing. And I’d see, I’d see these beautiful little fairy gardens that people had waiting for the preschool.
And I was going, this is beautiful. Oh my God. I want that for my kids. Yeah. And I would, I, so I started off with like this little area that was set up for this.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Teacher TOM: And, and then I’d like right away. Yeah. Kids loved it. They absolutely loved the toys. So they were out there playing with it. But then I’d watch a kid take one of the toys and start walking away and they’d start going to another part of the playground.
And I found myself saying, oh, that, that belongs in little world. That belongs in little world. And suddenly I realized that’s all I was doing all day long. So I just, and I realized that is, that’s the wrong environment for me. ’cause I was do, I was buying into that Pinterest idea or whatever we wanna call it, the TikTok idea or the, the, the, that beautiful setup.
And it does, and there’s nothing wrong with starting that way.
Rusty Keeler: Right.
Teacher TOM: There’s nothing wrong with creating something beautiful set up, but if you don’t let the children move those parts around, I mean, there’s that theory of loose parts, right? That Simon Nicholson, the theory of loose parts, and, you know, the, the import, the first word in that is loose, right?
Yeah, yeah. The second one is parts, right? They’re loose and they’re parts, they’re not part of anything until the child declares them part of something. Right. And so I, I’ll never forget just letting, I just said, I gave up, I gave up on little one. I just said, you know, and all the pieces, they were little things.
So they all disappeared. They got buried in the sand, they got lost in the leaves. They, they were all gone. And then one day, like three months later, I was out on the playground. I saw that somebody had made a little fairy house at the corner. Ah. Yeah, but it had spontaneously the child, him or herself, I don’t know who did it.
That child had created that space there and I realized that, you know, little world was dead long lived little world. And that’s, to me, whenever I think of loose parts play or junkyard playground, that’s where it starts for me. But yeah, they can’t be precious, right? If you have something that’s, that you’re worried is gonna get broken or lost, it doesn’t belong in a preschool playground.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Teacher TOM: I’ll give you an example of something precious that I treated differently and the kids need to know It’s different. I, when I was a boy, I collected matchbox cars. This was before Hot Wheels.
Rusty Keeler: Yep. Yep, me too.
Teacher TOM: And my mom pulled them out of the attic one time when she was moving and she needed to get rid of ’em.
And she said, do you want these anymore? And I said, I’ll take ’em to the preschool. But once I got ’em to the preschool, I thought, I can’t just throw these out there for the kids. These are too precious to me.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. Yeah. And so
Teacher TOM: what I did is I would tell the kids I would get, take the, I had this. Collector’s case with all the, all of ’em in their little compartments and everything.
It was really nice. So I’d show it to ’em. I’d say, this is from when I was a boy. These are really special to me. I want you to play with them. I’m gonna put ’em on that table over there and I’m gonna ask you, please don’t crash them or, and just leave them, you know, leave them on the table. And they still got crashed and everything, but it was great ’cause they would play so delicately with, yeah.
Rusty Keeler: It’s
Teacher TOM: amazing because we always, the stereotype is that the little girls like playing the little type things like that, and the boys like big motor stuff. Every boy was over there like carefully driving these, opening the little doors and then they put it back in the case and I didn’t have to be there managing them.
They were doing it because, because I told ’em it was special to. And this was a thing that was not one of your free play toys. This was just something if you want to interact with it. So I think there’s a space for that. Mm-hmm. But you’ve gotta be very, you can’t also do a play-based program or a, or a, a true play program where you have a lot of that going on.
To me, this is why I, I mentioned before the parents, right? Anytime they’re cleaning out their attic or their cellar or their, or anything like that, I would just say if you’ve got more than 20 of something or if you’ve got something that’s really cool, bring it in. Yeah. Yeah. And the kids find out if, and so this was stuff that was already on its way to the landfill.
Yeah. And that’s what I think about all the time is that preschools or any place young children are playing should be the stop between. Your gar, you know, your junk and the landfill. Ah, yeah. We should. In fact, there should be a Okay. Or early childhood center attached. That’s interesting. Every, every landfill or every ju every, we had a transfer station, like within walking distance of our, of our school, and we would go, they actually built an observation room.
At this place, it was a brand new facility. Okay. And we would go there like once a month and we would go up and stand in the observation room, watching ’em do the junk. And these guys in there, they started, started seeing us. The guys at the dump started collecting things they thought might wanna take back, and they arranged, they would arrange them at little displays for people to take.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, uh, it’s, for me it’s, it’s, this is my version of environmentalism. Hmm. Right. Instead of all of this junky plastic stuff, it lasts forever. Instead of just throwing it away, let’s give the kids one more chance to do something with it.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: Right? I mean. Hot glue guns are one of the things that somewhat controversial that I would let young children play with.
I’d let even two year olds use them and you know, don’t they get burned? Yes, they do. Everybody gets burned when they use a hot glue.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, yeah, right. Self included.
Teacher TOM: You rarely. Yeah. You rarely get burned the second time. Right? The first time that you know, oh yes. Stay away. Well. Adults get burned every time, but young children, once they burn themselves once, are pretty good about, yeah, look away from that.
And then I’d watch those older kids, like the five year olds, you know, they would, they would be working and then they would just shake their finger. They wouldn’t cry or anything, they’d just keep going. Right, right. Anyway, um, you know, just the stuff from the recycling box. You can build amazing, you can build forts, you can build dollhouses, you can build rocket ships, you could build anything out of your recycling box, every can, every box, everything like that.
And I’ve gotten into this terrible habit. It drove my wife crazy. I, I save every little thing.
Rusty Keeler: Uhhuh, every little, you’re like, this
Teacher TOM: could be, yes, we could do something with this for sure. Yeah, I can’t do it. I don’t know what to do with it. Yeah. But I guarantee a child would know what to do with it. Yeah.
And so we would just, we would just keep, you know, boxes of that. That’s so that’s why the jungle was, and then at some point the kids could just roam around the playground looking for stuff they wanna add to their, the whatever they’re doing. Sometimes they would wanna play games that involve like commerce, right.
They’d say, I have a store. Well, you need money for a store. What the money’s gonna be, wood chips or something else that was out there in the playground. Or they would, uh, you know, they would find, they would say, okay, any doll counts as money. And they’d go out and find little figurines and then they have to negotiate, well, what really well that one’s worth like three.
And sometimes they’re doing all this math.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, they’re doing
Teacher TOM: all this, this economic learning, but it’s just play with the junk. For me, Simon Nicholson is, I, to me, I think of him as a philosopher. ’cause if you’ve, you’ve probably read that original article of his in, in Landscape Architecture magazine, uh, 77, I think it was.
Something like that. Mm-hmm. Seven two. It was one of those. And, uh, you know, the article was entitled How Not to Cheat Children. Yeah. And it’s, it’s, it’s like he made that point. He goes, you know, all, most of our spaces, when you go to a library or a museum or something like this, these are spaces that have been.
That have been the fun part is over some architects, some genius, some one of the gifted few has designed this place and the rest of us just to go look at it. Yeah. We need places where we get to be the ones creating this space. And we needed a, you know, his argument was adults should have that too, right?
That it should be present for us in all of all spaces of life. And that really has influenced me because I always think is that you said, you know, create this beauty. My playground was always beautiful. Just from a, but I, it’s just not from my perspective necessarily.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. It
Teacher TOM: was from the perspective of a child.
Most children would walk at that playground. You could just see they were stunned by the beauty of it, the excitement of it, and maybe beauty’s not the word they would use.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. But
Teacher TOM: it was beautiful.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard a, a, a quote in the play work world about these kind of playgrounds. Playgrounds of they ain’t pretty.
But they’re beautiful.
Teacher TOM: Exactly. Exactly. And they, yeah. And they evolve. They change. They’re always, see, that’s the other piece that I love about it, is that these beautiful spaces, when you have to put all the pine codes back in the basket every day, and all of the rocks back in the rock box and all of this stuff, they, they stay the same each day.
You show up and it’s static.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Teacher TOM: Whereas I love the living, breathing aspect of a junkyard playground or an adventure playground or whatever word you’re using. ’cause each day you come in and you find it completely different. So often, ’cause we had these different groups of kids coming in, like the, the older kids would come in and say the little kids ruined it and that they would have to fix it and make it back to the way they wanted it.
And then the little kids would come in and say, oh, the big kids, you know, ruined it. And then they would have to fix it the way they wanted it. Yeah. And that’s exactly what Nicholson was talking about. Is each of us should have be, we are all the gifted few. Mm-hmm. We are the gifted many who should be out there creating our spaces, uh, because after all architecture, our spaces, our architects, our environments, that’s the first art form.
That’s the very first art form. I think it comes before dance even. We were creating spaces, although dance is pretty close up there, dance and rhythm. But, uh, it’s one of the very first art forms we have and, and our spaces really influence how we think and how we feel. Mm-hmm. And when you have a space where you look around to, the answer is yes to almost anything you think?
Mm, the answer is yes. That’s, that’s what freedom is. Yeah. Yeah. And I want children that I teach to understand what freedom is. Now, I know most of ’em are gonna go on to. Like standard schools.
Rusty Keeler: Oh yeah,
Teacher TOM: yeah. You know, a lot of them are, they’re gonna go on and they’re gonna, you know, they’re gonna love kindergarten, then they’re gonna like, not like first grade as much and then by the time they’re in fifth grade, they’re gonna hate everything.
And I’ve watched that phenomenon over and over again. Uh, well, it’s not that they hate everything because they still come back and brag that their school’s better than my school. But, but, but, but their, the children in the preschool cried on the weekends. Yeah. Those, those kids are like, I say, well, why are you visiting to me on a Wednesday?
It’s a day off. It’s parent teacher conferences. Yeah. And they’re excited to not be in school. Yeah. That tells me that they would, you know, I think, you know, my school was a place they wanted to escape into, you know, the junkyard playground concept. Yeah,
Rusty Keeler: yeah. But when
Teacher TOM: you’re, anyway, I know they’re gonna go on there and I, but I want ’em to still have that in the back of their minds.
I still want ’em to know what that feeling
Rusty Keeler: is of freedom and agency and possibility.
Teacher TOM: Yeah. Autonomy of, of knowing that you can ask and answer your own questions. You don’t only have to answer the questions that somebody else is asking you. Yeah. And uh, you know, I can’t remember who it was so somebody after they listen to this can tell me who actually said this originally, but I love this.
We know that there, that there might be hard times ahead for some of these kids or harder times, but what we’re doing is fattening ’em up. You don’t starve to prepare for a famine, you fatten yourself up for the famine, right? Mm-hmm. Before hibernation, the bear fatten himself up. So I’m hoping to get these kids strong and robust so that when they go out there in the world, I, one of the songs that we always sing is Little Boxes.
Ah, it’s a classic preschool song at one, at one level. You know, little boxes on the, there’s a green one and a pink one, and you’ve got all this. It’s very simple. And the people and the houses, and they all go, you know, but you, you and I know there’s a subversive level to that song.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: Right? Because people are being put into little boxes all the same.
Yeah. And they’re all made, made outta ticky tacky.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. It,
Teacher TOM: the kids always know that ticky techy means plastic. If you ask them, they’ll always say it means plastic. And I know that when we’re doing it in the preschool, they’re just. They’re talking about colors and boxes and people in box, in and out and all those fundamental, you know, ideas.
But someday, I’m hoping that at least one of those kids says, wait a minute, they’re trying to put me in a little box all the same. Right? I mean, that’s kind of what I want them. ’cause music sticks with you, right? Yeah, yeah. I, uh, I wrote a blog, a blog post about this, I don’t know, gosh, a decade ago. And, uh, I got a letter, I got a note.
I guess it was an email from, uh, uh, Malva Reynolds wrote that song from her granddaughter.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Teacher TOM: And her granddaughter said, thank you for keeping this song alive. Ah. And, uh, she was so happy about it. And she shared, she shared it around with everybody. She’s a folk singer as well. So, um, I, I, I know it’s still alive out there.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s that idea of having a, a time in one’s life for those young children where they can not be in a box. Physically and, and you know, metaphorically of like, they have the freedom to find who they are and what it’s like to work with other kids and find your parts of your trophy and mix it with your pine cones and mix it with the broken, you know, traffic cone and, and see what you can create and then talking it out and, and having that foundation, that idea of you talking about fattening them up, but it’s, it’s like maybe fattening up their sense of self.
Yeah. And their agency and knowing that, oh, this is who I am and I’m going forward in life, and, and wherever that takes ’em. Whether it’s, you know, you know, higher education and some, you know, job or just fifth grade. Yeah. Right. Like they know who they are and how to,
Teacher TOM: sometimes I think it’s sort of an act of violence to think about.
What’s gonna happen to these kids in the future? Because what’s important is what’s happening right now. But just the other day, a parent whose son is now going to university who had gone through my program, and this was a boy who at two years old, was teaching himself how to read. He was one of these boys with the crackling kind of academicy minds.
And I remember his grandmother would say to me, she’d, she’d say, uh, you know, my son Max, he’s so smart. He’s the smartest kid, you know, he shouldn’t be in this place playing with these other kids. I mean, she really gave me that kind of, that vibe. His mom though was, you know, she was like, she knew she was in the right place.
Yeah,
Rusty Keeler: yeah. And
Teacher TOM: she said to me, she goes, uh, she goes, well, max is now, he’s done well in school. He is gone through all this stuff and everything. He’s go, he’s decided, he, he’s gonna be an actor. And he’s going to NYU to be an actor. And she said, that’s ’cause of you teacher Tom. That’s because of that play base.
’cause he’s still the smartest kid in class, but he really knows what he wants in life and what he wants to be doing in his life. She said, so I give you a lot of credit. He knew to find his own way no matter what his grandma was saying, no matter what his teachers were telling him. ’cause all his teachers were like, you know, get into, you know, the athletes and do all this kind of stuff.
And he knew that what he was focused on and he was Yeah. His heart. Yeah. Yeah, he was the kid who was always trapping bad guys. That was always, he was always building bad guy trap. He and his buddy, they spent all day long building bad guy traps and I’d say, you catch any bad guys? Well, not today, but we’re gonna catch one tomorrow and then one day.
One day one of the moms was walking by and she tangled her feet up in these ropes that were, that they had put there, Uhhuh. And she stumbled a little bit and they, the two boys looked at each other and said, she must be a bad guy. We got her, we got her.
Rusty Keeler: Oh my gosh. Well, hey, I, I have pictures. I can’t wait to dive into, look at some pictures of this.
Okay. Uh, but when we, before that, uh, I wonder just for advice. For people who might have the nice basket of pine cones and the nice basket of, you know, uh, marbles and, uh, you know, and, and, and do beautiful things. I, I love loose parts also. Yeah. But to, to start to step in the direction of a junk playground.
What, you know, tho those benefits and how do you take first steps and why, why, why should they? Yeah. Yeah.
Teacher TOM: Well, for me, you know, the first step is turn your back when the kids dump your stuff, when they dump it, just turn your back. Just know, it’s just, just let ’em do it. You know? You, you can always pick it up later if you have to.
Um, the second one is expand your mind of what loose parts means. Mm-hmm. Right? Because the truth is, is that loose parts are, they can be, they don’t have to be little things. Planks of wood shipping pallets. When we look at the pictures, you’re gonna see, you know, to me, loose parts is anything that’s movable, and it doesn’t have to be movable by one kid.
Yeah. The best loose parts require a whole bunch of kids to move them. Yeah. You know, because those are cooperative. You know, those are, they’re, when they’re working together, they’re, they’re, they’re thinking outside the box and be creating a community. So for me that’s the, you know, that would be the first thing to do is ex open your mind and also.
The second you think something’s precious. Don’t have it around kids, you know, don’t, just don’t use it.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Teacher TOM: And understand they’re all gonna get lost and they’re all gonna get broken. Like those, those florist marbles you mentioned the marbles, like those little florist marbles. Yeah. By the time, I mean I, at our, I’m sure on that playground by now, there are over a hundred thousand of those buried in that.
Yep, yep. I know places like that. Yeah. I would just keep buying more. I keep, because they’re, they’re pretty inexpensive. Yeah. Joann Fabric or one or Michael’s or one of the stores would have a sale on ’em and you would just buy big bags full of them and I would just dump ’em outside. And the kids, you know, they, they loved them and, but they disappear.
And then I found out they were going home in pockets. Ah. Which is okay. That’s okay too. Right? If they treasure it, they’re loose parts, they can move.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Huh. Beautiful. Beautiful. Okay. Well, I, yeah, so I, I hope people are inspired and to think about loose parts in a new way and aesthetics in a new way.
Yeah, they might be a little scared. All right. Are you inspired? Are you amazed? Are you ready to support your children’s play? Are you ready for a junk playground in your backyard or a junk corner? Or just more loose parts. Yeah. Well, hope you’re inspired to rock and roll with it all. And if you know anybody else that might be inspired by this conversation or this podcast, hey, you share it with them.
You got a friend that you think might enjoy these topics. Yeah, why don’t you, why don’t you send it along to ’em, bring more people into the, into our community here. 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.
