My Mother, Mrs. Ilona Chukwudebe, had the first PlayLearn Nursery school on No. 5 Nwakobi lane in Enugu. She had her masters in Early childhood education and a vision to provide hands on creative education to preschoolers. Her school integrated Montessori philosophy and with my father, a Sandford trained electrical engineer, they made wooden and mechanical Montessori inspired toys both for the school and to sell at the then Leventis and Kingsway Supermarkets.
My parents were certainly mavericks! And in my mother’s honor, I asked her permission to give my school the same name in 1999. She gave me a little warning however that the word “play” was often misunderstood. People had a hard time combining the concept of playing while one was supposed to be seriously “learning.”
With her warning in mind, I incorporated training and parent workshops to educate our growing parent population of the power and the need for play in children’s learning especially in our early learners. Our curriculum and methodology drew from the researched best but went further to ensure that the children felt recognized and special from the moment they were welcomed to school until their teachers tenderly handed them back to their parents at the end of the day.
The success of our program became very evident to parents when their children refused to go home at closing, asked to come to school on weekends and no longer regarded their aunties and uncles (the teachers) as individuals they had to fear. They saw Playlearn as a place that embraced and celebrated their very existence as being simply children. You were a child and thus you were special and loved.
“Play” meant using the most creative ways to teach and giving children the opportunity to give their own life to what they learned. This blossomed into termly activities like our toddlers dressing up and decorating the school to show how much they knew their colors; our first graders interviewing professionals then role playing all they’ve discovered when learning about occupation; and even turning a gruesome discovery of a huge dead rodent into a murder mystery that had older elementary scholars coming up with scientifically accurate possibilities that led to the “Mysterious Murder of Mr. Rat!
Our school was often strategically targeted as the play-play school, which we proudly embraced and transformed into a bigger positive because when calling the school such a name, one could never take away the fact that our children were the brightest, the boldest, and had possessed decorum that stood out in any crowd.