Letting it go

A lot has happened. I've moved on from my centre of 9.5 years. I ran out of respect for our director for a multitude of reasons. This isn't the place for those reasons.

What I want to share is a moment from yesterday. I've been doing casual work to try out different centres, and I love one I'm at a lot, they're beautifully managed and have a solid philosophy of real play for children.

Yesterday I had to let it go. Let go of the control and hand it back to the children.
I was with the 2-3-ish year olds.
In the morning we noticed a rabbit out in the yard, which we watched through the window. Then we noticed that one of them was in our veggie patch. The veggie patch is 'fenced' with found sticks poked into the ground upright to deter the rabbits. So we trekked out there to shoo the rabbit away and stop it eating our capsicum.

In the afternoon one of the 3 year olds turned to me and said, "We need to make a scarecrow to keep the rabbits away from our veggies."
2-3 year olds aren't great at planning out their visions. And that's ok, it's a learned skill. The UV was still too high to be out in the sun, so we scrawled out on paper what we thought our scarecrows should look like. The scarecrows were lucky if they had facial features somewhere approximating their torsos, but that's figurative drawing with 2-3 year olds.

I asked what we should make our scarecrows out of. "Sticks!" was the enthusiastic reply.
What should we make the head from? "Sticks!"
What shape should the head be? "Square!" "Round!"... with a quick vote from those present we had a balance, so our scarecrow may end up having two heads for one of each.

How are we going to join the sticks together? ...... "Stickytape?" "Glue?" They weren't quite sure on this one.
And here was the point where I knew I had to let it go.
So I got stickytape and glue, they traipsed off enthusiastically to collect the tiny twigs they could find. And a small group spent 20-40 minutes carefully painting their sticks with glue and wrapping them with stickytape.

There didn't have to be a structure for them to see it as a scarecrow. There didn't have to be engineering or planned intention or a recognisable form.
What mattered was that it was theirs, that they could enjoy the sticky materials and puzzle out how to stick it down without getting stuck on themselves.

Of course I have ideas for how to put our scarecrows together, and we can get to those later, in stages, following the children's whims. But yesterday, it just felt so good to let it go and be happy with gluey taped up sticks, just as my beloved toddlers were.