As I crossed the Saint Constantine School recess field the other morning, I saw all around me evidence of our free play philosophy. Near the chicken grave, fresh pinecones sat in neat piles of six or seven. Nearby, a soccer ball was holding for dear life onto its last shred of plastic lining. The soil at first base is naked of grass, stamped to cement by innumerable sneakers.

Students here play. They play hard and often, usually kindly and sometimes carelessly; they play with sticks and shreds of leaves and bits of rock carefully culled from the landscaping. They play in ways that surprise me and teach me about what free play is and what it is not.

Free play is very in — a catchy alternative to helicopter parenting and children’s packed schedules. It is perceived as the inverse of structure, boundaries, and rules. A surface view of a TSCS recess might reflect this: students are allowed to wrestle, to bodily carry one another, to (famously) climb trees. Of course, school-wide rules still apply, like the oft-quoted, “sticks hit sticks!” but adult-imposed boundaries have receded.

What fills the void? After nearly five years at the school, the answer continues to fascinate me. When children are free to play, they create, and often they are drawn to create boundaries, rules, and structure. Peer beneath the foment of movement and noise, and you will discover games with dizzyingly complex rules and peer-upheld structure. At recess, the kids are free to make the rules.

Last semester, I kept finding branches arranged on the ground by the exterior gate, demarcating a rectangle. With all the free space at recess, students had drawn a boundary line. The branch had become a wall. Here was where they were going to play. This is mine, this is yours. During the school year, the sparsely drawn boundary lines changed. A few individual sticks became a stack. Like a bird building a nest twig by twig, lower school students hauled branches and interwove them into a secure wall. The fort, which is about twelve feet wide and ten feet deep, is now a recess fixture that has lasted months. Students patrol the perimeter, giving heed to their leader’s commands.

In this case, free play led to something not exactly free. But children usually live in an adults’ world where adults make the rules and draw the boundary. They move through classrooms adults have designed and sports fields where adults have built the fences. Free play gives children the opportunity to do this themselves.

Why students seek this should be no great mystery to me. We are created in the image of God. In creation, God brought order to chaos, and human creativity imitates God. In like, children’s play is orderly. They quest for pattern, boundary, and limits.

Thus, the pinecones and sticks appear, curious hieroglyphics representing order-creating play of children. They line up for kickball in a far straighter line than I have been able to enforce in the hallway. They obey each other and challenge each other — freely.