NARRATIVE, MOVEMENT

Region: South
Municipality: Vejle
By: Give
Year: 2020
Artists: Anna Hansen and Jacob Knudsen
Day care: Kildedalen

Body, senses and movement play a central role in children's development, and we see daily how the nursery children love to explore and use their bodies and senses. 

In this project, we would like to work on how we can arrange the nursery's space: a small corridor and part of the playground, so that we have an even better opportunity to support the sensory stimulation of all children, but also to organise small programmes for children who need special attention.

The aim is also to get ideas on how to stimulate the children in new ways: with quiet and contemplation, working on 'awakening' their senses (hearing, sight, smell and touch) in different ways, letting the children feel moods and sounds, each of which will affect their emotions and mood, and further stimulating the children's own curiosity to seek out the different possibilities available.

This can be permanent solutions or material that we can find and put away again.

In practice, this meant play and experimentation, working with the sensory in a broad sense. All guided by a story about ants and trolls respectively.

How has it gone in relation to the overall wonder?
In terms of our objectives for the project, it has gone well. Although it can still feel like it takes a lot of courage to experiment and follow the children's tracks, we know how to tackle it and we are now more playful in our work.

As a group we have developed new knowledge in relation to the curriculum themes and how to work with the curriculum themes by making it a game where there is room to follow the children's tracks.

We've got some solid concrete things: Rooms, materials, loose parts that are flexible and not to be used in the way it was originally intended. And in general it has been exciting to work with the things that were uncoded. So not predetermined what game was to be played.

We started with a story about Margrethe the Queen of Myriads, but halfway through the project, we changed it to our own story about trolls. Here we used some of the ideas we got from our artists, but also incorporated our own ideas. This gave us a very strong ownership of the results of the project.

It has been fun to see how the children have taken up the games and are now playing some of them outside the PlayArt project. And it has been exciting to see some children showing new sides of themselves and creating new communities, where children who didn't used to play together now play together.

What's next?
We are currently thinking about ideas and ways of working in our work plan for the curriculum themes. We want to include the whole aesthetic in it, as well as seeing the activities we do as coherent.

And we need to find a way to keep it loose, a way to make it commonplace and have it as a "culture" to try things.

What are we still curious about?
We remain very curious about using shadow play as a tool. It has many possible ways in relation to working with play and art.

We are also very curious to work on the way things are built - using storytelling and games to create coherence and a common thread.

And the music part of our project has generated a lot of interest in working further with music.

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