Professional Learning for Busy Educators

You may have heard of play. It’s that thing children do – the diverse range of unstructured, spontaneous activities and behaviours.

Children play in many ways, including by exploring movements, constructing with equipment, creating games, using imagination and chasing others around a playground.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises play as every child’s basic right. But play is becoming extinct. Global studies, across generations, have confirmed outdoor children’s play has been declining, across all age groups, for decades.


Play is every child’s basic right. from shutterstock.com
Unstructured play improves learning and social and physical development. Providing a variety of play options, improved play access and fewer restrictions can encourage children to engage in physical activity with peers in line with their imaginations.

It may be a new school year, yet I come to sing the praises of trampolines and bubble-blowing, pillow forts and peekaboo, Monopoly and Marco Polo.

A new paper in the journal Pediatrics summarizes the evidence for letting kids let loose. "Play is not frivolous," the paper insists, twice. "It is brain building." The authors — Michael Yogman, Andrew Garner, Jeffrey Hutchinson, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff — ask pediatricians to take an active role by writing a "prescription for play" for their young patients in the first two years of life.

"Play is disappearing," says Hirsh-Pasek, a developmental psychologist who is a professor at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. By targeting doctors, she explains, the paper hopes to build on the success of a literacy initiative called Reach Out and Read. That program reaches nearly 5 million children annually by giving out children's books at doctor visits. "You have an opportunity there" to change behavior, she says.

Prescribing play for kids? Really?

It's a sign that "we're living in different times," comments Anthony DeBenedet, a doctor, and co-author of The Art of Roughhousing and the author of Playful Intelligence, who was not involved in the paper. But he calls the article "beautiful" in the way it marshals the hard evidence in favor of climbing trees and talking on banana phones.

For many parents, back-to-school season incites a mad scramble to organize kids’ activities—from music lessons to math club and after-school tutoring. But a new policy report from the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests we’d do better to pencil in big blocks of time devoted to nothing but free play.

“Play is not frivolous,” the report says. Rather, research shows that play helps children develop language and executive functioning skills, learn to negotiate with others and manage stress, and figure out how to pursue their goals while ignoring distractions, among other things. The report warns that parents and schools are focusing on academic achievement at the expense of play, and recommends that pediatricians attempt to turn the tide by prescribing play during well visits for children.

Kindergarten teachers agree that their students need time to play each day—60 minutes of free play is a recommendation we often hear. This is supported by countless studies, a statement from Council of Ministers of Education in Canada, and Manitoba Education’s recent document, A Time for Learning, A Time for Joy. But what happens when you teach a multi-age kindergarten and Grade 1 class? You know that your kindergarten kiddos need play and you want to provide a developmentally-appropriate program. And, you recognize that Grade 1 kids need play too, but you don’t feel you can spare the time given the huge demands of literacy and numeracy achievement and reporting. What is a teacher to do without short-changing the kids or missing out on important instructional time? Here are ten tips to inspire you and provide some ideas for your classroom practice.

"Canadian kids aren’t just inactive but lack the fundamental movement skills, knowledge and motivation to engage in physical activities and play, according to a new study.

The study, led by researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, examined more than 10,000 children aged 8-12 across Canada over three years and found that only one-third of kids meet what is thought to be a basic level of physical literacy.

That means that most kids lack skills like throwing a ball and perform below expectations in aerobic tests, don’t get enough physical activity and what’s more — they don’t want to."

How do children learn; and how can their environment help or hurt that process? The answer to both may lie in the first years of our lives. Casey Lew-Williams is on the faculty at Princeton University and co-Director of the Princeton Baby Lab. He talks to us about the best ways to support children’s growth, the impact of poverty on early learning, and why the most sophisticated educational toys are often less effective than simply playing, talking, singing, and cuddling.

Did you know that more than just about any other activity, play is what promotes the healthy development of your child!

The most important thing to remember about play is that it should be pleasurable.  That means that if your child is having fun, then you are doing it right!  Play can use the mind, body or even props.  It engages the imagination and exercises the muscles, and it also allows our children to practice new skills.

All children are curious beings.  They like to explore and play, and these behaviours usually come quite naturally to them.  Play that allows for exploration provides a sense of discovery and learning.  This discovery and learning are actually a valuable source of pleasure to the child.  They find exploring and learning fun.