By Jenna Rist, Teacher
Play—especially free play—is vital to life and learning, a fact that has been demonstrated anecdotally and through research many times during the last 50 years. In an attempt to increase academic performance in American schools, many classrooms have increased instruction time at the expense of play time. Similarly, direct academic instruction has become more prominent in early learning situations as well. This flies in the face of what many researchers and practitioners know about young children: they learn better when they are self-directed and engaged in play.
At Bing Nursery School, children play with open-ended materials like blocks, clay, paint, sand and water, and while doing so, build foundational skills that they will use in kindergarten to meet the Common Core State Standards, a set of skills students are expected to achieve by the end of each school year. After leaving Bing, most children will be entering school systems that use the Common Core State Standards. What children learn at Bing is a precursor to the more formal academic skills listed in these standards. When we take a close look at what happens in one of Bing’s child-centered, play-based classrooms, we see that meaningful learning and skill building abound.
Through lots of experiences with writing and painting, children acquire literacy skills such as following words from left to right, segmenting syllables in spoken words, and applying phonics skills. Painting allows children to manipulate a paintbrush and use it as a medium for getting their thoughts and ideas out into the world. Children can explore the sensory qualities of paint and later explore the complexity of their own thoughts and ideas, making increasingly advanced representational paintings.
Repeated experience with paint leads to increased intentionality and intricacy as children explore color, lines, shapes, patterns and symmetry. Children also enjoy exploring the paints and brushes as new writing tools, playing with the size and boldness of the paint in writing their names and captions for their work.
When the classroom butterflies came out of their chrysalises this spring, a child felt this was a moment to remember, so he painted one, which he wanted to label. He talked through the sounds with a fellow 5-year-old, explaining, “It’s just a butterfly,” before asking, “How do you spell butterfly?” He and his friend practiced their phonetic and inventive spelling, coming up with “BDRFLI,” which is a typical way children learn to put sounds together to make words.
A child labels his butterfly painting the way it sounds: BDRFLI.
Through play with water, children learn to describe and compare measurable attributes of objects and classify them into categories. In addition, they participate in collaborative conversations, ask and answer questions, and express thoughts, feelings and ideas. Water lends itself to sensory exploration with the hands and the entire body, as well as to experimentation with properties like temperature, color, pressure and flow.
A 4-year-old made observations about flow when experimenting with water and gutters, saying, “When you pour, the water goes down!” She went on to experiment with bottles and pitchers, noting which ones poured for longer, which was her way of determining which ones held more water: the longer they poured, the more water they held. She then sorted the bottles and cups by size and type. Another child explained how to make ice: “Use cold water, put it into the freezer until it’s freezed, then you can put it into a drink and it’s cold and crunchy.” The children also explored the ice teachers had prepared for the water table and tried to melt it using water and salt so the plastic animals inside could “swim” freely.
Playing with blocks provides opportunities for children to make discoveries, act out their ideas, and work with variables including texture, weight and balance, while stretching their cognitive capacities by spurring them to consider measurement and spatial relations. At the same time, it stimulates social and emotional learning when children work together on a project and navigate failures such as when their blocks fall down. Language development and emergent literacy expand with the help of peer collaboration, the making of signs to identify their creations, and storytelling.
Children build math skills, for example, through years of hands-on experience with objects they can manipulate. These beginning understandings of math include one-to-one correspondence, cardinality (the principle that the last number reached while counting is the number of objects in the set) and addition and subtraction. Two 4-year-olds were building together with table blocks when they realized the table blocks were similar to the unit blocks on the carpet. They finished their structure and carefully carried it over to the block area to serve as a model for recreating the structure out of the larger blocks. They counted the blocks used and identified the types of blocks to ensure they matched. Throughout the process they narrated for themselves how many were still needed, such as, “We need six blocks, and we have four. We need two more,” demonstrating an early understanding of addition and subtraction. They repeated this process with increasingly difficult structures.
Sand is a natural, readily available, open-ended material with rich sensorial and tactile properties and nearly unlimited potential. Repeated interactions with sand provide young children with many opportunities to make discoveries, express ideas, test theories and gain important physical, emotional, social and cognitive skills. Children often seek to share and preserve their work by making signs informing others of what they have made and how to use it.
Through their exploration of sand, children learn to use a combination of drawing, dictating and writing to supply information about topics and to narrate events. Several children worked on digging the deepest hole possible. As more children came, some worried that a child could fall into the hole and get hurt, so a 4-year-old ran inside and made a sign, and then said, “I made a hole sign for you. It’s warning people that there’s a big deep hole.” The sign offered a pictorial representation rather than words. This inspired another 4-year-old to make his own sign, saying: “I made a sign for the hole. It says, ‘Don’t go.’ Don’t go in that hole because it’s too deep. You’ll get hurt.” This child used writing to inform others and was beginning to work on narrating an event.
By working with clay, children learn new vocabulary, develop fine motor skills and build muscles in their hands. Children also learn how to solve problems with materials. As children become more comfortable with clay and confident in their abilities, we see their ideas come to life and see small groups working together to replicate objects and experiences in their lives.
Clay provides children with opportunities to model shapes they see in the world, as well as to describe them, provide additional detail, and add visual displays to supplement their description. A 4-year-old had been struggling to draw and cut heart shapes, but clay allowed her to iterate until she got the shape just the way she wanted it without getting frustrated about unsatisfactory outcomes. Clay and most of our other basic materials emphasize the process, allowing learning to happen in its own time. The child knew how she wanted the heart to look and was able to describe it in great detail. Once she shaped the clay into a solid heart that she was happy with, she decided to display her ideas in yet another way, creating the outline of a heart.
When given the time, space and materials to explore, children will seek out learning opportunities and advance their literacy and mathematical thinking skills independently. They are motivated to solve problems and make discoveries. These examples show children’s capacity for advanced thinking and reasoning when their exploration is supported by a teacher and extended through repeated experiences with the same materials. Basic materials like blocks, clay, paint, sand and water allow children to do so much more than just play. They are learning and growing in ways we typically don’t even notice because it’s happening so naturally. Play and learning are not mutually exclusive activities, especially not in young children. Nurturing a playful and curious spirit in a child leads to natural, relevant and remembered learning, setting a child up for success in kindergarten and elementary school with the Common Core and beyond.