Perfection and Gingerbread House Learning

In typical Fiona creativity and brainstorming style, I dreamed up making gingerbread houses from scratch with primary school aged children as part of my Pre-Christmas program. I knew it would be a big project and I trialed different parts and mapped a 3 step process, knowing the children would need to persist until they got to Day 3, the “icing on the cake”, when they got to decorate their houses. But it wasn’t until we were in the midst of building our houses that I realised just how complex a task I had set us and how incredible the young people were that had taken on the challenge. And it got me pondering.

Firstly, I noticed my inner critic was busy at work telling me that I should’ve prepared better, that it wasn’t okay to set children up with such a complex task and not ensure their success. I was berating myself for not thinking through and planning for all the contingencies. I was realising that showing children example images of “perfect” gingerbread houses created an unrealistic expectation of what they might achieve in 3 short sessions. Tuning into that critic, at first noticing my fear that the children mightn’t have a good time and then what she might have to offer me, I recognised one of my values and associated strengths. I value deeply the power and capacity of children and I never dumb down what I do with children thinking they are less capable or competent. I allow them to be powerful, autonomous etc and guide them with rich authentic learning tasks.

Through the rich learning cauldron of making gingerbread houses from scratch with a bunch of 7-10 year olds, I've been reflecting on how much we put up "perfection" as the completely unattainable standard of homogeneity, when life itself is created with rich diversity and uniqueness. Far from the challenges, struggles, problems and imperfections being a failure, they were the vehicle which led to such incredible learning and the demonstration of vitally important life skills such as persistence, resilience, problem solving, help seeking, creativity, adapting plans and the emotional intelligence required to feel ALL the feeling which come from such an experience. Sharing all the laughs and exasperation with each other was so life giving, lightening the individual load when things didn’t go right, and sharing in the joys.

I end all of my sessions with a page of emojis and the children choose which represents their feelings and what word that is. On day 3 of our gingerbread house building, this emoji reflection in one of the groups led to the most amazing, profound conversation. One of the children spoke of how they were at the same time disappointed that the house hadn’t turned out the way they had hope, but proud and happy recognising how much effort they had put in. We had a really rich conversation about how our inner critics can really rob us of celebrating the incredible work we put into things and our achievements. We discussed how seeing if our inner critic has wisdom to share is helpful but that we must make sure we don’t let that voice take over and cut us down. The children recognised that voice and the importance of balancing that out with the acknowledgement of all the greatness as well. We also spoke of how much perfection is put up as the standard in life and how unhelpful this is. It was such a profound and wonderful conversation, it will stay with me (and I hope the children) for a long long time.

I’ve re-learnt a really important lesson, that it’s imperative that we show, demonstrate and model imperfection for our children to counteract the barrage of photoshopped images and “highlight reels” which confront them daily when they engage in a social media saturated world. Next year I’ll be showing all the versions of the gingerbread houses we made with all their uniqueness and none of them picture perfect like the professional images. I’ll also be showing them some of the wondrous, inspirational gingerbread houses made by talented professionals and enthusiasts to show them what is possible. And I’ll be ensuring that the children and their families enter the gingerbread house making project knowing that the JOURNEY of creating something totally unique from scratch is the focus, not the outcome.

I'm so proud that the children were able to participate in such a rich learning opportunity and reflect on the highs and lows with wonderful emotional intelligence and that we can share these unique imperfectly perfect gingerbread houses in all their glory.