from Playborhood Berkeley

Frowning and Fighting: The Laws of Fort Play

Posted: 05/15/08 04:38 PM

[This post is the second in a series on fort play by Mark Powell. In the first part, he describes how the children at Lexington Montessori School in Massachusetts began building and playing in forts at recess. Both posts are edited extracts from Mark Powell’s thesis “The Hidden Curriculum of Recess” in which he writes in detail about the fort play phenomenon he studied while at LMS. A third post in this series will appear shortly.
*All names used are pseudonyms.]

As a lower elementary teacher at Lexington Montessori School in Lexington, Massachusetts from 1994 through 2002, I witnessed for eight years the development of an extraordinary child-centered and spontaneous world of recess play. As children entered the elementary program at LMS, they were initiated into a culture of fort building by their peers. The forts, built entirely from sticks, leaves and found objects from the surrounding woods, were the site of considerable experimentation with different forms and rules of social organization and various styles of construction.

Continued on Playborhood Berkeley…

by Mark Powell

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