Learning and Teaching Through Play

Aim for your day to be through planned, purposeful play, with a balance of adult-led and child-initiated activities.

Play and playfulness are shared across all ethnic groups, with some variations according to the beliefs and customs that influence how they raise children. Whānau/Families typically play with their children, and they devote a great deal of time to helping children to learn by teaching them:

• how to play, through structured games such as peek-a-boo, and open-ended activities such as sand and water play;

• how to pretend, by being imaginative, acting different roles, making one thing stand for something else;

• how to be playful, by demonstrating playful ways of interacting with others through humour, gentle teasing, jokes, mimicry, riddles and rhymes, singing and chanting, clapping games, and using materials and resources in imaginative ways.

In high-quality ECE settings, children have opportunities to play as well as to experience a wide variety of adult-led and child-initiated activities. Teachers build on children’s knowledge and experiences, and provide opportunities for progression, extension and challenge. These activities can also successfully build on the child’s innate joy in play. Ideas of play, child-initiated and adult-led activities overlap and it is useful to be clear about what is meant by these terms, how they can work together to support learning, and the adult’s role in each.

Play is freely chosen by the child and is under the control of the child. The child decides how to play, how long to sustain the play, what the play is about, and who to play with. There are many forms of play, but it is usually highly creative, open-ended and imaginative. It requires active engagement of the players and can be deeply satisfying.

Play engages children’s bodies, minds and emotions. In playing children can learn to interact with others and be part of a community, to experience and manage feelings, and to be in control and confident about themselves and their abilities. Play can help children to develop these positive dispositions for learning:

• finding an interest

• being willing to explore, experiment and try things out

• knowing how and where to seek help

• being inventive – creating problems, and finding solutions

• being flexible – testing and refining solutions

• being engaged and involved – concentrating, sustaining interest, persevering with a task, even when it is challenging

• making choices and decisions

• making plans and knowing how to carry them out

• playing and working collaboratively with peers and adults

• managing self, managing others

• developing ‘can-do’ orientations to learning

• being resilient – finding alternative strategies if things don’t always go as planned

• understanding the perspectives and emotions of other people.

There are many forms of play that support different areas of learning and development. Construction play, for example, involves spatial and mathematical knowledge, problem-solving and reasoning. Exploratory play with natural and man-made resources builds knowledge and understanding of materials and their properties and develops manipulative skills.

As children develop as players, the ability to pretend has special significance for children as learners. When a small child begins to pretend that one object stands for something else – such as a block is a phone – a key ability is being formed. Children are beginning to understand the idea of symbols, which eventually leads to being able to think in abstract ways. In time children will be able to use words and images (marks, drawings, and symbols) to express ideas, predict or solve problems, instead of having always to rely on trial and error with physical objects. This supports children’s development as a flexible, creative thinker.

Role-play involves the next development of this imaginative play, where children are able to ‘become’ someone or something else. In taking on a role, children see how it feels to have another point of view and learns that the world looks different to different people. This brings the realisation that we all think, including the child, and this awareness of being a thinker and a learner is one of the strongest supports for successful learning. Children become more aware of their own mind, and that they can think of different strategies to try when faced with a task or a problem.

Teachers cannot plan children’s play, because this would work against the choice and control that are central features of play. Teachers do plan for children’s play, by creating high quality learning environments, and ensuring uninterrupted periods for children to develop their play.

The adult is an interested observer of play, finding out about the individual children and the community that is created through play. The adult should seek to discover what children are interested in, know and can do in order to support their learning more effectively. Children’s achievements across all areas of learning can be recognised through observing play. The skilful practitioner will also be alert to opportunities to join in the play sensitively and appropriately, in order to enhance the play and learning. Supporting children’s language as they play, by describing what children are doing or commenting on current actions, is a prime way in which practitioners help children to learn through their play. At times the adult will support children in developing their abilities to play, perhaps through modelling how to pretend, or ensuring that children with specific educational needs are supported in how to participate in play opportunities.

Child-initiated activity has many characteristics in common with play, as it is wholly decided upon by the child, based on the child’s own motivation, and remains under the child’s control. It may involve play of many types, or it may be seen by the child as an activity with a serious purpose to explore a project or express an idea which the child may not see as pure play.

Practitioners are aware that a child-initiated activity is a powerful opportunity for learning and make the most of this.

Practitioners:

• maintain their focus on learning, and actively use a range of strategies to support and extend learning through engagement with the children – including introducing new words and new ideas, thinking out loud, modelling more complex ways of speaking, posing new problems, encouraging negotiation of conflicts, explaining, or demonstrating approaches.

• offer assistance and support as needed to help children to be successful in following their ideas, including talking about or suggesting strategies, and practical support such as holding an object in place as the child works with it

• ensure that the learning environment offers a range of stimulating open-ended materials, outdoors and indoors, which children can use and combine in their own way to meet their own purposes

• ensure that children have sustained time to develop their activities

• encourage children to use the language of learning as they make their plans and carry out and review their activities, talking about things such as ‘I remembered, I tried, we found out, we know, I can, we thought, we solved the problem.’

• use a problem-solving approach to resolving conflicts or behavioural issues, helping children to be aware of others’ points of view and thinking together to agree on a solution

• observe children’s activities carefully, trying to discover what the child is thinking about and learning and the goals of the play, so they can accurately support and extend the child’s learning focus either at the time, or later by changes to the environment or in planned activities.

Adult-led activities are those which adults initiate. The activities are not play, and children are likely not to see them as play, but they should be playful – with activities presented to children which are as open-ended as possible, with elements of imagination and active exploration that will increase the interest and motivation for children. As well as focused activities with groups of children, adult led activities can include greeting times, story times, songs and even tidying up.

Practitioners plan adult-led activities with awareness of the children in the setting and of their responsibility to support children’s progress in all areas of learning. They will build on what children know and can do and often draw on interests and use materials or themes observed in child-initiated activities. As with child-initiated activities, the practitioner actively uses a range of effective interaction strategies to support learning in the adult-led context.

Practitioners participating in play.

Practitioners often have difficulties knowing when and how to interact in children’s self-initiated play. They often make the mistake of going into a play activity with lots of questions and may try to take on a role that does not flow easily into the play – one practitioner described this as ‘going in with your size tens and flattening the play’. Children like playing with adults, however, and actively seek adults as co-players. A guiding principle is to do what young children do when they are learning to be good players – they often stand at the edges of play and watch what is happening. They may be observing strategies for entering the play, trying to understand the rules of the play, or thinking about what they can offer. Sometimes they ask permission to enter – ‘Please can I play?’ – and sometimes they wait to be asked. Children seem to know intuitively that they need to tune in to what is happening in order to be included in the flow of the play

Practitioners can use the following strategies to join in play:

Take a little time to observe, find out what the children are playing, and what are their roles and intentions.

Consider whether you need to enter the play, and for what purposes (such as offering suggestions, introducing new ideas or vocabulary, managing the noise or behaviour, extending the activity through additional resources or negotiating entry for another child).

Try to play on the children’s terms by taking on a role that they suggest and following children’s instructions. With the youngest children, often participating alongside and imitating a child’s actions with the same type of materials will signal that you are in tune and start a playful interaction.

Offer your own ideas when you are sure that they are consistent with the flow of the play.

Avoid going into closed questioning (‘How many? What colour? What size?’). Instead, try to maintain playful ways of engaging by following children’s directions, and tuning into their meanings.

Try not to direct the play to your own learning objectives or assessment agenda. Instead, be alert to the qualities of play, and to the knowledge and skills that children are using and applying.

Playful adult-led activities

Alongside the child-initiated and play activities where adults can have a key role in supporting learning, there is an important place for activities initiated by adults. Adult-led activities provide opportunities for introducing new knowledge or ideas, and for developing and practising skills. The activities can provide a new stimulus, or an opportunity to revisit or further develop learning. Sometimes the activities could be prompted by children’s interests as observed in their play. At other times practitioners will identify areas of learning which are less likely to be available to children through daily experience and play, where adults can best take a lead in introducing new ideas and concepts. This ‘adult agenda’ could be addressed in any adult-led time, planned small or large group activities, greeting time, story or song times.

Adult-led activities may:

• provide open-ended opportunities where practitioners observe and support children’s learning during the experience and consider next steps based on children’s responses; or

• have clearly specified learning objectives which will be matched to children’s current learning to extend or consolidate what children know and can do.

Adult-led activities should be playful, even when planned with a specific objective in mind, by maintaining characteristics of play through a sense of playing with things, ideas, imagination, and others. Playful practitioners will plan activities which motivate children by:

• presenting tasks in imaginative ways

• ensuring tasks are as open-ended as possible, allowing children to make choices and express their own ideas

• using materials or storylines that children associate with play

• providing for children’s hands-on, active participation.