Our missionis to create opportunities, platforms, and safe spaces (including psychological safe spaces) for children to use play, creativity, and the arts as a means to develop crucial 21st-century leadership & life skills.
Playeum is a charity that works to empower all children (right now, in Singapore). We also partner closely with the social sector to work children from marginalised backgrounds.
Why Play,Creativity& the Arts
Many parents and educators underestimate the value of play and its implications for practice. Playing the Playeum way talks about open-ended, unstructured, self-directed play. When children play, they empower themselves to experiment, push boundaries and take control of their own learning.Play nurtures the imagination and innovation, which are both critical in thinking. It allows them to be actively engaged and think about experiences that matter to them. Through play, children develop confidence and agency to make sense of the environment around them.
Play nurtures crucial 21st century skillsIn play, children are active participants.
Why do you think children love to play – because that is usually one area they have autonomy. Play provides an invitation for them to become engaged and unlock their creative potential, with adults as the creative facilitators.Through play, children encounter situations which help nurture skills that are crucial to meet the challenges of a vast changing world. These skills include communication, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, self-awareness, self-regulation to name a few. Play also invites children to develop adaptability, agility and resilience when faced with failure. Children need safe spaces to fail and fail forward.
We partner with the adults in children's lives - parents and educators.Through training programmes, we empower adults to facilitate critical growth, imagination, critical thinking, communication and collaboration in children.In order for our children to receive continued experiences that allow them to be creative beings, the adults in their life have to feel empowered to create these experiences for them.
The first step is to examine our own perspective on children:
Do you see them as creative and competent?
Or an empty vessel waiting to be filled?
Do you see them as contributing active citizens at home, school, neighborhood, society?
Or are you an active citizen only when you vote?
How we see our children, determines our interactions and setting our limits or creating possibilities.
Playeum’s Learning Through Play 16-hour empowerment programme helps both new and experienced early childhood educators’ in Singapore to be equipped with the skills and confidence to redesign their own curriculum using play & the arts as an anchor.
The COVID-19 situation has presented some really big shifts and opportunities in everyday life. We can also see how leadership at every level requires transformative skills like resilience, agility, creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration to name a few.To cope with these unprecedented times and the future VUCA* world, children will need these important transformative skills to navigate the world.
The intention of the training programme seeks to broaden mindsets and empower educators with the knowledge, skills and practices to shape their own way of engaging with children in their class through play. The training is designed in a way that empowers the educator to tap into her or his own creative resources so that they can transform any curriculum with their creative lenses.
With each educator trained, he or she impacts multiple children in a year. The Training-the-Trainer model is what Playeum is investing in to multiply the impact of mindset shifts, personal creative potential and to build the creative influence they can have on thousands of children.
*Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous
