Guide | Facilitating slow play

As an educator working with babies and young children in museums, I am fascinated by how they use “traditional” gallery spaces – with glass cabinets, paintings hung at adult viewing height and objects that can’t be touched – for play.

I noticed that galleries displaying art often support children and their carers to engage in  “slow play”. My work as a practitioner researcher at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has helped me to adapt this for
the wider museum context.

Slow play involves deep connection and intention, and is fuelled by curiosity and a quest for exploration – all well supported by museums.

While slow play can be harder to identify than physical or imaginative play, it is accessible to a range of people including pre-mobile and pre-verbal babies, as well as those with complex needs.

Slow play does not necessarily take a long time; in fact, slow-play moments might be quite fleeting. But this kind of engagement slows the overall pace, as it involves deep focus and attention.

Slow play sits within standard definitions of play, as it is self-directed, freely chosen and intrinsically motivated. Opportunities to pause and dwell are an important facet.

When children become mesmerised by patterns of light on gallery floorboards and trace these with their eyes or movements, we are watching slow play unfold. It can be a toddler using all their physical coordination to navigate a huge marble staircase – not to reach the top, but because they want to experience the climb.

A child gazing into the eyes of a sculpture of a seated human figure, mirroring its pose or vocalising excitedly, is another form of slow play.

These playful moments interrupt the pace and enable visitors to linger with a single object or experience.

Slow play resists the pressure on children, families and educators to be always accelerating towards the next step. Instead, it invites them to take their time and use the museum environment to connect with objects and with each other. This enables their knowledge, skills, sensitivity and curiosity to come to the fore and be acknowledged.

The pace of a museum visit can help families feel at ease, as it is less hectic than their everyday routine. A museum environment is multisensory and absorbing, with lots of opportunities to pause, revisit and repeat – the perfect conditions for slow play. 

Nicola Wallis is a practitioner research associate, collections and early childhood, at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge