As an educator, I love to play as much as possible while attending to all the other teaching and learning responsibilities of a busy classroom, and the children I work with love to play too! Children want to play every chance they can get. They ask me to play with them almost every day; what an honour to be invited into children’s play and to learn alongside them as they constantly make discoveries out of ordinary moments that adults too easily take for granted.
Some educators might say things like, "We need to limit free play time as much as possible" or "They get too crazy when they have time to play," as though playfulness and exuberance in early childhood are bad things! There is often a strong focus on teacher control of children’s movements, actions, autonomy, and choice in ECE classrooms, effectively limiting children’s freedom of expression. But children’s natural impulse to explore the world and the materials around them is through play. It’s what their brains and bodies are biologically built to do.
Without play, children’s nervous systems get dysregulated, and their behaviours get bigger and even more challenging for educators to support properly. Ironic, huh?
Children learn while playing. Of course, children also learn when doing focused math exercises or practicing how to write their letters. Because children need to succeed academically in an increasingly demanding, fast-paced, and competitive world, learning how to do table work, sit at the carpet during circle time, and add and subtract up to 10 before kindergarten makes strategic sense (depending on the child). However, there’s a missing piece from this equation that only prioritizes academic learning: Let them have dedicated play time too!
Teach these same linguistic and mathematical concepts while playing, too! Count how many bugs are on the tree trunk. Ask children to think about shifting states of matter when the snow falls from the sky, piles into a drift, and then melts on the sidewalk the next day. Point out letter patterns and phonetic sounds when reading signs. Talk about colours, weight, shape, size, texture, and categories when at the grocery store, the playground, the dinner table, the doctor’s office, the hockey game, the pet store!
When children play, they learn imperative language, social-emotional and problem-solving, and critical thinking skills. Play is the context that puts all the formalized learning and worksheets into perspective. It’s a careful dance, a balance.
We know it’s important as adults that we have downtime, creative time, or play time for ourselves to unwind before, during, and after a stressful day or event. We often scroll on our phones, go shopping for new things, plug in a video game, or do exciting or fun activities with our friends in order to tap into our own playfulness and sense of adventure. So why do we increasingly lean towards denying children – who will spend the rest of their lives working, much like their grown-ups currently do – the opportunity to play, particularly when their imaginations are at the most potent, their creativity the most unbridled, and their inquisitiveness the most unbiased, during the early childhood years?
Over and over – from anti-racism to play-based learning – Mr. Rogers seems to have got it right.