Last weekend we went to the Santa Ana Zoo with our friends Natalie and Odette. The SA zoo is awesome- they have lots and lots of monkeys!! If you are a little zoo, you might as well optimize the space and get the most entertaining animal. I like that strategy. I also find it totally intriguing that they HAVE to have these monkeys- The guy who donated the land for the zoo, Joseph Prentice, did so only with the stipulation that the zoo must have at least 50 monkeys at all times. I wonder if it is a struggle to maintain that number of monkeys? What happens if they dip below the magic number of 50? The story is awesome. Also, they seem to use the term "monkey" loosely because (ok, this is the 8-year old animal-nerd who lives inside me coming out) they totally have non-monkey primates, including gibbons (apes) and lemurs (prosimians).
Anyway, the thing I really wanted to write about happened after exploring the zoo, while Stella, Charlotte, and Odette were playing on the zoo playground. I noticed that right after entering he playground, all the kids kind of congregated in this little spot under the slide that mimics a kitchen- there are two benches and a table. It looked like they were having some kind of important strategic meeting under there, and there were at least 6 kids involved. Then, all the kids collectively started some kind of spontaneous kid-project. First, they started picking up sand with their hands and putting it on the table. They made a nice sized pile of sand.
Then, they started going over to this push and picking leaves off of it. They did this for a long time, all the kids grabbing bunches of leaves, and not being all that gentle with the bush. Some of the kids seemed to stay by the table, supervising.
They carried the leaves back and forth, although sometimes Stella just picked leaves and scattered them on the ground for fun. They also gathered sticks. I went over to see what they were doing, and found this pile of leaves. There seemed to be a little confusion over the goal of they play, as one kid told me they were making a pie and another told me it was a chicken nest. Eventually all the kids agreed it was a chicken nest. The nest got bigger and bigger. The kids worked together pretty well on it for at least 15 minutes, when two kids got in a fight over one stick they both wanted and parental figures intervened. I wish I had pictures of all the kids crowded around the table, but I thought other parents might think I was weird so I tried to just get the kids associated with me in the pictures.
I have been thinking a lot about this since it happened. I am so intrigued by these kinds of spontaneous collective endeavors, where a bunch of people start to play together in some way that they didn't really plan out beforehand. Another interesting element to me is when the play is not dictated in some way by the setting- it is kind of unexpected. Kids seems to do this relatively frequently, grownups not so much. I am going to look for more examples of grownups doing this. I wonder if there are ways to induce this kind of thing more often, especially among grownups?
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