Play in Childhood
Hi, my name is Susie Fahrer, and I’m the Executive Director of Rainbow Community School and Omega Middle School.
One of the things that we often associate with childhood is play. As a school, we recognize that play is something that is critical to children’s learning. In our Early Childhood Program, our students spend time outdoors and in their classrooms that are designed for imagination, creativity, and autonomy, to come out and develop through play-based learning.
What does play-based learning look like?
So what does that really look like? Well, on the playground, our children often engage the spaces around them and their peers in storytelling, in creative use of the materials.
A mud kitchen becomes a restaurant. The sandbox becomes a place of building community and castles. The structures for climbing might be mountaintops, or we might even see children transform themselves, imagining that they are animals, exploring the world around them – engaging with the trees, the rocks, and the grass.
Problem Solving Through Play
All of this is showcasing a child’s natural ability to see themselves as problem solvers, to think curiously about the spaces around them. In the classroom, this is the time when Play-Doh becomes an engagement of number, shape, size, and all of those pre-mathematical concepts. Block-building explores scientific knowledge of balance, structure, physics, and movement.
Students see story and language all around them. The creative play area might become a bank or a store. They start to explore these ideas of community, which they’re making meaning out of, every day in their daily lives.
Teachable Moments
Our teachers are trained to take these moments and really use strategies of questioning, dialogue, and play as a way to engage our students in deeper learning, but also as a way for them to be leaders and thinkers on their own.
Think about a time when you were learning something, and someone simply told you how to do it. That can be really efficient and sometimes necessary. But now imagine a time when you struggled through something. You were doing it on your own, you were exploring it, or perhaps it was an activity. Maybe it was your first time skiing or learning how to drive a car.
These were all things that took your ability to engage and “try.”
Play as a foundation of learning
Play-based learning is the beginning of those dispositions. As students matriculate, the imagination continues. But it’s built into project-based learning, their ability to explore literacy through creating projects that showcase the critical elements of a story, or the idea that they can create games that help practice mathematical skills.
It increases their social relationships through learning, but it also continues to build their confidence in recognizing that learning is about taking positive and playful risks.
Teachers and Staff Engage in Play
Equally, we create spaces for our staff here to engage playfully with one another. On Wednesdays, we have professional development, and part of that process is creating spaces for open-ended thinking, collaboration on lesson planning, and, really, at the heart of it, using the disposition of play to bring joy to the work we do with ourselves and with our children.
I hope that part of what you connect to out of this video is an opportunity to think about how you can bring more play not only into your engagement with your child, but also into your own life.
An Invitation
We all have those experiences where play has uplifted something about what we’ve learned, what we do, and how we engage with the world around us. It’s a powerful tool for supporting creativity, joy, and the capacity for each of us to recognize the ownership of our own learning. If you want to learn more, look at the attached file.
You can engage in a tour with us. Come and visit. Or if you’re already here, as always, my door is open. Let’s have a conversation about how you can use play in engaging your child in their learning journey here at Rainbow. Have a wonderful day!
