The Christmas Tree #playiceland Guest Post!

Unnur Henrys and her teaching team at Leikskólinn Stekkjarás brought a recycled Christmas Tree into their playground. Here is her post and photo set of what this Christmas Tree brought the children of her school. It brings about the question adults, parents and teachers both, ask themselves hundreds of times over the course of a single day...Should I fix this for them? The adults watching children try and fail can easily offer a solution or could fix it for them. In this case, it would have been so easy to simply lift the tree up by the base to position it in the tower, just so. In the end though, the children struggled and the tree would fall and then sit and if the adults had intervened, the children would not have discovered the most fabulous alternative use for the tree!

"My kids were trying to lift a Christmas tree up and into a play structure tower we have that we call "the castle." All week they have been moving the tree around and they always seem to push it so the branches go against the way they want the tree to go, so they (the kids) struggle a lot to get the tree where they want to bring it.

We did not say anything, just waiting to see what happens or who will find out a better way to transfer it. ;-) But the photos speak louder than a 1000 words, so here are some that I took of the children hard at work :0)

With my big mouth, I sometimes had to ask them after they left the tree and gave up on the project to try to lift it from the bottom rather than the top. They were very quick to give up on that one and the reason they gave me -- "It is too heavy."

Final project of the day was to use the tree as a sled and slide down."