By Steve Sucato
The proverb “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” can be applied to educational learning as well. At Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s Warner Girls’ Leadership Academy, students are embracing play to learn via GroundWorks’ Creative Play after school residency program. Built of interactive sessions where students are encouraged and supported to explore play, the program is helping students there find engagement and joy in an alternative to traditional dance instruction.
The residency this Spring, taught by GroundWorks DanceTheater’s Education & Community Engagement Director, Rebecca Burcher and company dancer Nicole Hennington (along with GroundWorks Maddie Hanson, Madison Pineda, Teagan Reed, and Victoria Rumzis as Teaching Assistants) led students through group games where they worked together physically towards a collaborative goal. Those games included dance, theater, and improvisation activities with titles like “Mirroring, with and without sympathy,” “Self-space, general-space,” “Body-magnets,” and “Fruit Salad,” where students needed to work with one another to find success and improve physical and social emotional wellness.
“The students have been focusing on keeping each other safe during play,” says Burcher. “They’ve shown great improvement in spatial awareness, following directions, and using our words instead of fighting. They are now working on keeping each other’s feelings safe through community building and anti-bullying.”
WGLA’s students in the program have also been creating their own dances around different bullying topics, and as a group, have helped to establish new Creative Play program norms including being respectful and listening to teachers and instructions, as well as being nice and treating people the way you want to be treated.
Like WGLA’s nickname the “Wildflowers,” students in the latest part of the session have been sprouting their own forms of creative learning by being given time, space, and the materials for open-ended play (play with no rules and no goals). They have also taken advantage of the weather to practice outdoor creative play using open-ended toys like cones, hula hoops, balls, jump ropes, ankle skippers, and chalk. The students have even taken to inventing their own games and obstacle courses.
Partnering with the Center for Arts Inspired Learning and indirectly with Say Yes and NewBridge, the Creative Play program’s goals are to increase SEL, gross motor, and fine motor skills in the participating students. With play as the program’s central motivator, those goals are surely being met in a way that is sure to have WGLA’s participating students feeling anything but dull.
Photo by Rebecca Burcher