The game is a tool through which the child expresses his identity and develops his knowledge, even the most complex
When approaching the time to decide which school to enroll their children, the parents ask, rightly, the question about how they must proceed in the choice. A question that is not easy to find an answer since it is quite rare to find schools equipped with truly effective information tools.
When a parent asks me for advice on which criteria to adopt for this choice, I reply without any doubt: “try to identify the school where children are willingly every day and where the game, understood in its broadest and most deep sense, occupies a prominent place in the life of the school”. Aware of the obvious differences, I consider this indication valid whether it is kindergarten, whether it is primary (elementary) school and, in some ways, also for middle school. Faced with my suggestions, many parents remain a little surprised. Many of them rather have the idea of a school, especially the primary one, in which children are constantly engaged in the study and exercises, activities that they rightly consider tiring and to be carried out remaining sitting at the counter for many hours.
A school therefore in clear contrast with the game considered by many, erroneously, only as a leisure, as an escape from the effort of work. But it is important to understand that only an adult of the game is underlying this reaction, very far from the reality of children.
The importance of the game
The game is the main tool through which the child expresses his identity and develops his knowledge, even the most complex. Many scholars have shown how free and socialized game has an important and fundamental function in the development of cognitive, creative and relational skills. The game for children is a very serious activity and can be compared to the activity of a passionate adult for what he is doing, an activity in which he has the feeling of being able to express his personality. In other words, the child who plays can be compared to the adult who does his job with passion and who precisely for this goes with pleasure to the place of his work.
Starting from this parallelism, the best school for children, not only that of childhood, but also primary, is the one that proves to be capable of making children passionate about school life. To do this, or at least to have the hope of succeeding, he must know Use and enhance the playful dimension as much as possiblemust be able to welcome childhood development in all its aspects, motor, perceptive, emotional, cognitive, communicative, social, linguistic and moral. In other words, it must be a truly welcoming school, capable of putting the whole child at the center of his attention.
Of course, all this becomes an empty affirmation of principle if it is not placed in a school reality capable every day to keep alive the close relationship between learning and the life of children, not only the future one that only see adults, but, above all, the present, perceived by children. It is therefore necessary that the intertwining between learning and concrete life is immediately clear in the didactic choices, between the motivations and interests of the child, “here and now”. A really possible intertwining if the child has the opportunity to live at school a social life full of stimuli, experiences and opportunities to test himself and to take responsibility for himself and to others that only a school understood as an operating and cooperative community can really offer.
Historically in our country a synthesis like the one I tried to exhibit, it was made only in the most advanced experiences and by the work of lonely teachers in our long country, often left alone by the school administration, but who have been able to put experiences of great progress for our entire school. Teachers and experiences who operated through an active and cooperative education approach, in which they developed an “operational teaching” capable of creating a school that really puts the child in the center in all its dimensions
The six fundamental points of the “Operational Didactics”
- Individualization: The starting point is the concrete child, with his inner world, his feelings, his knowledge, with his bio-psychic balance, his interests, his uniqueness.
- Socialization: orthe individual is by definition a social being; Education itself is a process of socialization in which the individual of social values are communicated with the aim of making an active, conscious and responsible member of the company. The class and school are the gym to train children’s social skills.
- Operations: To be educational, a social context must be structured on the basis of the values that you want to transmit. A value is not conquered except by implementing it, exercising it, making it operational.
- Motivation: The teaching of a welcoming school must have the needs of the child by motive, satisfy his needs and interests and create a strong motivation in him. The child must consciously tend to achieve an intentional and possible end, exercise an activity that gradually leads him to conquer values and skills (whether they are practical-instrumental, behavior, cultural, moral).
- Concreteness:In the proposed activities we must worry about starting from the concrete, not a generic concrete, but a real real, what is expressed and realized in the concreteness of the individual’s life.
- Organicity:The coordination of the activities that take place is the basic condition for the school to be as a welcoming community. It necessarily concerns all activities and all aspects of the life of the class: work to be done, attribution of tasks, commitments and related deadlines, whether they are individuals, groups or the entire community.
