THE BOTTLE OF SODA, THE PAPER WATCH AND THE GALLOWS:

inventions, creations and children's imaginations to learn by playing in a curriculum

Abstract

This article starts from the following question: how does playing enable learning from experiences that children create to escape the routines and prescriptions of the curriculum? To bring problematizations from this question, we developed an ethnographic investigation from a post-critical perspective in a municipal public school. The argument developed here is that children experiment, invent and create ways to play to escape the routine of school curricula, and thus learn by playing and play by learning. Based on the experiences that children themselves are exposed to, we understand that by exposing ourselves to the good affections they allow us to have, we also need, as teachers, to invent other times, intervals, durations, extensions to proliferate learning in school curricula, which escape of the rigidity and control given by the normative prescriptions that constitute many curricula.