Developing Play for the Under 3s

The Treasure Basket and Heuristic Play

Anita M. Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317414377
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

We currently live in a two dimensional world of tapping and sliding fingers on screens, but babies and young children need to touch, taste, smell, shake and bang three dimensional objects in order to develop thinking and learning skills.

The Treasure Basket and Heuristic play approach is all about offering natural and household objects to babies and young children to play with. This simple approach promotes extraordinary capacities of concentration, intellectual curiosity and manipulative mastery.

Full of resource ideas and activities, this book offers accessible explanations of how the under 3's think and learn, step by step guidance for setting up play sessions and descriptions of the best materials to offer. Featuring original interviews between the author and Elinor Goldschmied, who was the pioneer of the Treasure Basket and Heuristic Play, this third edition of Developing Play for the Under 3s has been thoroughly updated to include:

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• A new chapter with case studies to show how Heuristic Play can be offered to the 2-4 year olds.

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• A new chapter exploring the myths and misunderstandings of this approach.

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• Links to the Forest School movement.

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• Research evidence supported by case studies.

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• The characteristics of effective learning and how the Treasure Basket and Heuristic Play promote these.

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• Information about the Froebel Archive project, bringing the story of Elinor Goldschmied's work alive through film.

Based on a wealth of research into how babies learn and the principles of learning, together with the author's own personal experience of working with the under 3s, this book will be indispensable for anyone involved in the care and development of children in this age group.

Chapter 1 A tribute to Elinor Goldschmied

DOI: 10.4324/9781315686189-2

Elinor Goldschmied died on 27 February 2009 at the age of 98. Since her death, she has been heralded as a ‘great thinker’ and a ‘pioneering expert’ of the twentieth century. While this is undoubtedly true, she would be personally horrified by such adulation, as she was one of the humblest people I have ever met and was never interested in personal recognition. All Elinor ever wanted was to have her ideas understood and put into practice. Indeed, her ideas were incredibly practical and simple and she always paid particular attention to detail. Her favourite quotation, from William Blake, was, ‘He who would do good to others must do it in minute particulars’. Elinor devoted her entire adult life towards improving professional practice in the care and well-being of babies and young children.

Her three main contributions were:

1. The Treasure Basket
2. Heuristic Play
3. The Key Person Approach.

In 2001 and 2002, I recorded several conversations that Elinor and I had together, and have decided to include some extracts to give readers some background as to how her ideas came into being. One day, I asked Elinor what she thought was her most important idea and, without hesitation she answered, ‘The Treasure Basket’.

I then probed into how she got the idea in the first place and this led on to her telling me pieces of her life story. We are all influenced by our earliest experiences and they shape our thinking and our attitudes for the rest of our lives. Elinor was born in 1910 into a prosperous family in rural Gloucestershire. She was the middle child of seven children and was educated at home during her early years. However, her idyllic life was shattered when, at the age of eight, her favourite eldest brother died and then, soon after, her mother died too.

Elinor’s roots are in the natural world; a place of freedom and discovery. I shall now tell you something about Elinor’s early life in her own words.

Anita: You always talk about the importance of minute particulars. Where do you think this came from?

Elinor: I think my way of thinking comes from looking at the minutiae. Did I ever tell you about lying on the grass when I was a little girl? Well it was a garden lawn and I measured out a little space about as big as a handkerchief. I was giving strictly focused attention on what existed on a ‘piece of a surface of the earth’! Lying on my stomach, I thought, ‘I’m going to trawl every tiny visual variety, tactile variety, smell variety and temperature variety which I can observe in that space’. I might see a thing like an earwig, which was enormous compared to the grass strand, struggling to climb over that piece of grass. And getting down to the actual size of what that piece of grass was – and gearing oneself into the earwig’s world and seeing what the challenge for the earwig was because everything was huge.

Somehow I was tackling this business of space and presence in space and how much was it possible to visualise oneself in a space which was enormous and yet there it was, covered by my hand. It’s the same as the fascination I had with the story Gulliver’s Travels. I always had a lovely illustrated copy of Gulliver’s Travels. This business of being tiny and large (like the story of Alice in Wonderland) had a real resonance in my childhood, partly because it was my real experience. I had a very tall uncle and I remember his large feet that were like a picture of the enormous Gulliver’s feet. I felt like the tiny Gulliver. I saw the adults in ‘layers’ somehow.

Anita: Tell me something about the Treasure Basket and why you think it is so important?

Elinor: The Treasure Basket is an attitude of mind; an attitude of observation. The way I use to formulate it is, ‘everything is there and the only limitation is me!’ I am in the world now, here. What I am able to select from, or separate out or focus on is entirely up to me. Therefore the Treasure Basket provides a whole world in focused form because it is deliberately collected to embrace a part of what is there.

Anita: How did you conceptualise the idea of the Treasure Basket in the first place?

Elinor: I would think through my early childhood experiences in the countryside. We had no toys but we would have something like a trowel, something you could dig with and acres of time playing in and around a stream that ran through our orchard. The stream was full of stones and interesting shells. There must have been some geological movements at some period because there were an awful lot of stones and shells of different kinds. We spent hours of time playing with mud, water, leaves; all the natural things. Every single thing became an element of interest.

When I think back to childhood and what we did in the countryside it was terribly dangerous but you did not fall out of a tree! And you did the balancing thing and the water was down there but somehow you knew very well what you could do and couldn’t do.

We had tea parties too, made up of berries and stems and bits of shells... really the collection. So the collection, which is really the Treasure Basket had in it all these natural elements, which were enormously varied of course, given enough time and space.

We know those experiences are not accessible to the urban child or the rural child either, these days, because of pesticides and what not. So the availability of instruments for exploration and imagination is not easily there. I imagine that what we are doing is finding alternatives to be available. Mostly the alternatives are plastic toys and a load of oddments, as in the Treasure Basket, is never thought of as educational material. The Treasure Basket is a very sophisticated concept, but it is also unconventional. It is blindingly simple but appears difficult for most people to do. I wonder what it is that trips people up and why they don’t ‘get it’? The objects are eminently chooseable. They aren’t too sophisticated.

There should be no such thing as a toy, really. They have no basic reality; they are invented. It’s only real because it has a function invented by someone else to do something. Some elaborate toys have only one function and you can’t combine them in different ways; you have to put it together or play with it ‘that way’. A pile of plastic is a desolate sight; there is brittleness about it. It can’t be mended. There are some good toys that give a variety of options like Lego, but there are not many.

Anita: Tell me something about your professional career and how you became so interested in the education, mental health and care of very young children.

Elinor: It started when I trained as a nursery teacher at the Froebel Institute in Roehampton, Surrey. It was a way of getting away from home and it was very good indeed. My first job was in the junior school of Dartington Hall in Devon and I was there for 5 years during the 1930s. I met up with some interesting people, who were in the theatre and so on and then I became politically. Very early on I took myself to the Soviet Union. I think I was about 21 or 22. I just signed myself up for one of these tours... there were these tours to the Soviet Union. A couple of the theatre directors signed up for the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR. A friend was one of the secretaries of the society, so she organised for me to go. It was £28 for 28 days. You just arrived at Victoria station in London and then we went by train from Ostende to Lubke. I was rather good at doing that kind of thing! Then on that kind of trip you met people and made connections.

Another thing that influenced me was my stepmother. She went into a menopausal depression and became quite mad. She spent 14 years in a mental institution. It wasn’t understood in those days and I followed her suffering with terrible pain because she suffered. She was an intelligent woman and she realised what was happening and my poor father couldn’t make head nor tail of it. She was at home a lot of the time looking like a ghost; it was a very severe depression. In a way I was caring for her indirectly and that directed me really towards mental health training. I wasn’t frightened by my stepmother’s mental disorder. In 1937 I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to the mental health course at the LSE [London School of Economics] to train as a psychiatric social worker. It was there I met my late husband Guido, who was Jewish and had been driven from his home town of Trieste by the fascist regime.

During the war I found myself running ‘playgroups’ for evacuated parents and their children. I put it together with anything I could find because there was no play material to be bought in the war. In a way the terrain was perfect because you couldn’t buy anything so the obvious thing was to use what you could. No one had any difficulties about accepting that because there wasn’t anything else. I didn’t have to do any campaigning about that. The local authorities had to provide something for these East End mothers who were always complaining and pining for their husbands and feeling insecure and complaining about the food and so on. The authorities had to lay on something that could help these mothers abandoned out into the countryside. They weren’t very good at being in the countryside. In fact they were pretty hopeless! But the local authorities had no choice; here was a trainload coming from the East End and they were just arriving with gas masks on strings round their necks and labels saying who they were. Some of the very young evacuated children had chewed their labels. I was in a kind of social work service, providing service for the children and was asked to take responsibility for a group of evacuated children whom they considered ‘unbilletable’. They had rather wild behaviour and were put in this large single dormitory and looked after by the ladies of the WVS. They were the ‘good ladies of the manor’ and they all wore uniforms of green overalls and cocked hats! They kept shouting out orders like, ‘Come along now!’ and ‘Yes! Yes! Just here!’ I was fascinated by these ‘come along’ voices and wondered about what it felt like to be the children, isolated, lost and rushed. I found myself on both sides of the cultural and social fence. I had the accent and could talk like these posh ladies; I knew ‘my way around’ perfectly well. That was a help because it eased the tension and I was able to help the children without seeming to be a threat. Instead of there being one large dormitory, I divided the children up into small groups with an individual staff member in charge of each one. The children calmed down in weeks. I realise now that this experience gave me the idea of the Key Person approach.

Anita: So what happened after the war? I know that you said you worked in Italy and that is where you first tried out the idea of the Treasure Basket with babies.

Elinor: Yes! In 1946 I went to live with my husband, Guido and son Marco, who was then only a baby, in Trieste. When I first arrived I wondered how I was going to make a life there and how I would fit in. It was still under British occupation, so I was on both sides as it were. But I found Trieste to be a sophisticated town, not at all parochial; it was an international place with Catholics, Jews and Middle Eastern people.

I managed to get a job working in a state institution for illegitimate and abandoned children. Can you imagine it? I was working in an institution where ‘Institute for Illegitimate Children’ was written over the door. Luckily it wasn’t run by the church otherwise I would not have been let in. Instead there was a medical director in charge. He was an intelligent paediatrician who had grown up in Vienna and had known Freud. His wife was a local magistrate, who had also been to university at the LSE. They were an open-minded couple and so there were a lot of possibilities for me. As I was willing to turn up punctually, bring play material, do the things I said I would, they took me on. It served me very well as I was able to take my son, Marco with me.

It was there that I saw for the first time what Bowlby was describing in terms of mental and emotional deprivation. These babies in their cots were ‘closed off’ and when I offered them an object they reached, then drew their hands back. They just couldn’t cope and I could see their level of fear and anxiety about touching until eventually they managed to pick up an object with enormous caution. From a moment of negligence it became a moment of exchange. I then began to look around the environment for objects which could be held, sucked, banged to make a noise or moved by rolling. Those objects were my first collection so I did the Treasure Basket in a context. I’ve actually taken film of all that too.

The matron of the institution got the idea and so having play material as part of the routine of the day became the obvious thing to do. The staff began to have relationships with those babies too. We were able to reduce the crying, anxiety and all those negative things.

I then met Elda Scarzella, who began the idea of the Villagio della Madre e del Fanciullo. She had a new building in Milan and set up a coherent provision for mothers and their illegitimate babies. Under state provision, mothers weren’t allowed to keep their children, but the purpose of this new provision was to keep the mothers and babies together to foster their relationships. There were thousands of illegitimate children at that time. Through this work I was able to introduce play for hundreds of babies who, previously had been cared for, with no activity. I introduced the Treasure Basket because children in this category needed play more than anyone. I then began teaching and training in other institutions and my interest in group care has simply carried on to this day.

What Elinor failed to elaborate upon in her usual modest way was the fact that through her work she pioneered the transformation of childcare in Italy. Indeed she continued to provide training in Italy and then in Spain until she was aged 90.

However, in 1955 Elinor returned to England following the death of her husband, in order for her son, Marco to receive an English secondary education. She worked as an educational social worker for the London County Council until she decided to work as an educational consultant in several London boroughs. I met Elinor in 1981 at one of her training courses when I was working as a play and language specialist in the local authority day nurseries for Hammersmith and Fulham. She became my mentor, friend and colleague from then until her death in 2009.

The Froebel Archive Project: a lasting legacy

In 2006, shortly before Elinor was due to move home for the last time, she decided to offer, as a gift, her entire collection of films to her friend and colleague Dr Jacqui Cousins. Jacqui was, in equal measure, both delighted and concerned by this offer. It was because she knew this meant she had the responsibility of taking charge of irreplaceable and valuable material. She also wanted to be able to share it with as many people as she could. The collection comprised more than 20 professional and private films of Elinor’s work, spanning almost half of the twentieth century from 1950 to 1992.

Although Elinor did write some books and articles, the most well known book being People Under Three (1994), which she wrote with Sonia Jackson, she often told me that writing did not come easily to her. Elinor was a great teacher and inspired all those who were fortunate enough to meet her. She passionately believed in the power of the image to inform and educate and made films of what she saw in childcare, both good and bad. Her films are the most potent legacy of her life’s work. Indeed she created films which would influence childcare policy and training both in Italy and the UK.

In the dialogue, earlier in this chapter, Elinor refers to film she took of babies, lying and rocking in their cots, deprived of mental and emotional stimulation. These babies were so ‘closed off’, as she put it, that they could not cope with touching any objects. When Elinor first showed me those grainy black and white films, it both shocked and distressed me and reminded me of the images which had been portrayed on the television of the Romanian orphans in the 1980s. I too have always believed in the power of pictures and following the production of a film I made in 1991 (I don’t need toys) Elinor asked if I would collaborate with her to make a film about Heuristic Play. By the end of 1992 we had produced Heurisitc Play with objects where we filmed toddlers and practitioners in four London nurseries. This film is still selling well over 20 years later. However, most of Elinor’s films were no longer commercially available. When Jacqui was offered this priceless collection she wanted to make sure that the films could be offered to a whole new generation and did not simply get stored in a garage or somewhere like that. As Elinor had originally trained as a teacher at the Froebel Institute in the late 1920s, they both agreed that the films could be placed in the Froebel Archive.

However, that was not the end of the story. Not satisfied with the films simply ‘gathering dust’ in the archive, Jacqui Cousins decided she wanted to bring them back to life. In 2010, she approached Tina Bruce, who is on the board of trustees at the Froebel Trust, and discussed her ideas with her. Tina was immediately captivated and spent the next 12 months in negotiation with the Froebel Trust to secure some modest funding for a 2-year project. I was invited...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword to the first edition
• Preface to the third edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A tribute to Elinor Goldschmied
• 2 How babies and children learn
• 3 The beginning of sensory and physical development
• 4 The Treasure Basket: ‘What is the object like?’
• 5 Offering the Treasure Basket
• 6 Heuristic Play: ‘What can I do with the object?’
• 7 Offering Heuristic Play material
• 8 Heuristic Play for 2- to 4-year-olds
• 9 Myths and misunderstandings
• 10 Play with a purpose (2- to 3-year-olds): ‘What can this object become?’
• 11 Expanding the approach
• 12 Conclusion
• References and further reading