World-Building Phase
Sometimes we spend days evolving a metaverse. It starts with one idea — a fragment of an existing story or world — and then everyone adds to it.
We make kingdoms and trading routes, rules and legends, sometimes even currencies and alphabets. We write songs for the people who live there and invent their weapons and boats, feasts and ceremonies. When someone asks why the mountains are red or what the creatures eat, we find our own answers — in books, in stories, in games, by watching the weather — and use whatever we find to make the world feel more alive.
Our worlds are made of everything we notice. A dream someone had, a book someone’s reading, our Pokemon cards, our dinosaurs, Minecraft, whatever we're playing with or talking about — it all folds in. We argue and rewrite and start over; we build and break and build again. Every world we create together teaches us how to listen to one another and how to hold many ideas at once.
We move easily between our worlds — recruiting younger children into our games, lurking on the fringes of older children's conversations, modifying something on the farm that has become part of our story. It feels like practice for living in a world that’s always changing: paying attention, creating, and finding our place inside it.
The World-Building Phase marks a shift into greater complexity — both in thought and in relationship. Between nine and thirteen, children begin to explore identity, belonging, and responsibility through the lens of creation. They test ideas and social roles inside intricate worlds of their own making, where imagination and reason collaborate as equals.
These worlds are not escapism; they are laboratories of thought — places where children collect, combine, and reconfigure information from every corner of their experience. Research, negotiation, and problem-solving weave together in organic ways as they construct living systems of meaning. Knowledge from many domains — stories, videos, games, physics, mythology, architecture, mathematics, ethics — becomes raw material for building coherent yet fluid realities.
In this creative exchange, skills such as reading, writing, and working with numbers are engaged and developed as tools that enable their expression and understanding. Language, pattern, and symbol all evolve together, serving the children’s drive to make sense of complexity and to communicate what they discover.
Facilitators at this stage hold the edges lightly. They are present as companions and resource-keepers, supporting depth and dialogue while leaving the internal logic of each world intact. Freedom and structure are constantly rebalanced as children move between imaginative creation and real-world inquiry, developing both independence and interdependence in the process.
The World-Building Phase is where thought and imagination become alive — where creativity and analysis merge, and where the mind learns to stretch, revise, and dream in equal measure.
