Play for children is a natural impulse through which they can explore, experiment, problem-solve, and discover as they build and solidify their understanding of the natural and social environment they live in.
However, it is still often viewed as a leisure activity – something done at home or as time out from meeting academic goals. It is often overlooked, misunderstood, or not valued enough as a key learning tool in the overall development of a child. But play really does matter!
Play Matters
There is a vital connection between play and learning. Through play, cognitive skills are developed, and it helps to improve overall language and literacy development. It could be mark-making in the form of a shopping list, labelling items for sale in the class shop, or babbling and commenting on pictures in storybooks.
Play is a vehicle through which children begin to think ‘outside the box’. They learn that experimentation and risk-taking form part of life’s natural pattern and that making mistakes is not necessarily negative but a form of learning that helps us move forward to a new level of understanding.
Children also learn key social skills, such as collaboration, negotiation, compromise, and the importance of our behaviour towards others in building relationships and well-being. It naturally cultivates choice and agency and lends itself to purposeful conversations about the task at hand. As teachers, we can maximise this by asking questions that require genuine thought from a child, e.g., “Tell me about your picture”, instead of concept-checking questions, e.g., “How many animals are there in your picture?”
Child-Initiated Play
Play can be divided into two main categories: child-initiated play – led and controlled by the child rather than an adult’ (Drew, 2019, para. 2).
For this type of play to be successful, we need to establish well-thought-out spaces, known as continuous provision areas, to help scaffold free and guided play opportunities. Depending on the size of your class, you could have an area with dressing-up boxes, a home area with kitchen utensils, a reading area with age-appropriate picture books, a nature table for transient art and a construction or small-world play area with resources for children to engage with. By doing this, we provide the perfect stage for children to do something they are very good at – imaginative thinking!
These areas should be well-resourced spaces with materials to help scaffold your learning objectives and ideally be accessible throughout the school year. The teacher’s role is one of a facilitator and observer during child-initiated play, taking notes on individuals’ cognitive progress and aspects of behaviour as they interact with their peers, nudging children when necessary or redirecting play if difficulties arise.
Guided Play
Guided play, on the other hand, refers to playful activities with more teacher support. The teacher has a clear learning objective when setting up the activity, e.g., building a tower using geometric shapes. The learning objective is to discuss the colours, shapes, and the number of shapes children use to make their towers. Children should still have a degree of choice and agency over their play, but direct teacher intervention can help extend learning beyond what they might otherwise have achieved. For instance, if a child’s tower continually falls, a teacher might suggest making a wider base with more blocks to make it more stable.
Forms Of Engagement In Educational Settings
Play has many forms and can be broadly divided into these categories in our educational setting:
- Games with rules: simple board games or card games, Simon Says
- Play with objects: construction blocks, soft/plastic toys, a nature table (leaves, twigs, seeds, shells, and dried fruit), household objects
- Pretend: acting out everyday situations such as at the doctor’s, dressing up for a special event, cooking, or preparing a picnic for class mascots and toys
- Symbolic: using an object to represent another, e.g., a banana as a telephone or a cardboard tube as a microphone
- Physical: hide and seek, follow the leader
How To Implement
“I’m not sure how to deliver learning through play”
To ensure activities are balanced and have maximum impact on a child’s learning and development, we need to:
- Establish a safe and supportive environment
- Provide rich literary and creative resources: marking boards, crayons, natural materials, plastic toys, dressing-up clothes, and household items
- Act as a model, providing clear linguistic guidance
- Be flexible in your guidance
- Give children choice and voice
- Observe and prompt when necessary
- Ask open questions, e.g., “Tell me about your family picture”
Play-based learning is process-orientated as opposed to outcome-orientated. It allows children to experiment, discover, make mistakes, readjust, and move forward on their learning path without requiring one set, measurable outcome. It translates into happy children, which in turn motivates them, instilling positive attitudes towards lifelong learning.
