Che scatole queste regioni

Playing, for a cub, is a serious thing! The engagement is total and the experience is immersive: the cub might even forget to eat or sleep. This natural propensity of the game has been grasped since antiquity. Recognition has been given to an immediate connection between playing and learning (Denti, 1999), a bridge that a child uses to discover the world. “What is a table, for a one-year-old child, independently from the use made of it by an adult? It is a roof. You can crouch down there and feel at home: a custom-made home,” (Rodari, 1973, p. 99) This is a one-to-one relationship between ourselves and places. Froebel (1826), listening to children while playing, developed the first intuitions of imagination, creativity and imagination and he recognized the game as the main tool to enter in the relationship between ourselves and the world. Also Montessori (1948) notices that children use playing to absorb and process mental images of the environment. This is a fundamental process to develop the sense of place and the attachment to the places themselves (Tuan, 1977). But be aware; the game is a free activity, separate from reality, uncertain, unproductive, internally regulated, fictitious but above all funny (Caillois, 2000). Adopting fun in an educational relationship does not mean assimilating learning to laughter by making it “ridiculous”, but means using playful strategies that leverage motivation to learn in a natural context. But the opposite is also true, if a teacher does not enjoy teaching by playing the educational pact fails (Donadelli, Labate, Rocca, Moè, & Pazzaglia, 2012). The experience starts from a real problem: primary school teachers find it hostile and tedious to teach Italian regions and for this reason the subject is hostile and boring for those who have to learn it. Taking up this challenge was proposed to 150 future teachers of the degree course in the sciences of primary education. They had to create a game to promote a fun way to learn the regions. The games were presented inside a “fair” titled “boxes of the regions” in which the participants (mostly primary school teachers) have been sent to play without time limitation according to shared rules. The sounds collected during the day follow the geographies of the games invented and played in which the territorial fact - the Italian region object of the game - intertwines with the to do - in funny meetings/ clashes movements on the processes that characterize a region - meeting and maturing the sense that, thanks to the game, those places have taken on the value of having lived them through a playful and fun dimension.