Someone recently asked me about my most cherished memories as a child. I immediately thought of the time I spent playing with my brother and my cousins. When we weren’t at school, we spent hours at our grandparents’ home engrossed in all sorts of play. We dug for bones and remnants from ancient civilizations as we imagined being archaeologists and paleontologists. We roamed the woods. We choreographed dances and performed plays. We played hide-and-seek. We created magic potions and secret pacts in our tree house. As an educator looking back on these memories decades later, I can see that the play we engaged in was not only fun, it was an essential part of our cognitive, emotional, social, and physical development.
The Benefits of Play
The benefits of play are well-documented and widely accepted among researchers and educational experts. Decades of research have shown that unstructured play in early childhood:
promotes health and fitness, including the development of muscles, gross and fine motor skills, reflexes, balance, bone density, and cardiovascular function.
increases language skills, social skills, and empathy
develops imagination and creativity
advances executive function skills, such as self-regulation, which allows children to control their behavior and emotions, resist impulses, and demonstrate self-discipline.
supports healthy brain development in the prefrontal cortex, which supports the ability to learn
increases children’s capacity to store new information
relieves stress and reduces anxiety, irritability, and aggression
encourages independence
is linked to the later development of reading and other academic skills
The Disappearance of Play
Despite the critical role of play in the early childhood years, researchers have discovered that in many Western countries, children’s time spent in unstructured play has been declining over the past several decades. Some educational scholars refer to this as the ”schoolifying” of early childhood in which the preschool years have become more academic or school-like.
Fueled by educational policies such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top that emphasize accountability and student achievement in a narrow set of cognitive skills, these policies have created a high-pressure environment in many early childhood classrooms where the focus has become the production of desirable test scores in the academic areas of math and literacy. In practice, this translates to drastic increases in scripted curriculum, teacher-centered instruction, standardized testing, and preparation for tests.
This recent push for ‘academic achievement’ reminds me of a large-scale, long-term study conducted in Germany in the 1970s. In it, researchers studied graduates from play-based kindergartens and graduates from academic-focused kindergartens where teacher-directed instruction was prominent. Initially, the graduates from the academically-focused kindergarten exhibited greater academic gains than the children from the play-based program. However, those gains faded by fourth grade and in many cases, these children performed significantly worse than the graduates of the play-based program in all measures used in the study. Long term, the children who attended the play-based program were more advanced in reading and math, and they were better adjusted both socially and emotionally.
A number of more recent studies have produced similar results, including a 2022 study of children who attended state-funded, academically-focused preschools in Tennessee and those who were not enrolled in preschool. In it, the children who participated in the state-funded preschools initially outperformed those who did not attend preschool on “kindergarten readiness” measures. However, after third grade, those who participated in the academic preschools fared worse academically, a trend that continued and grew stronger after sixth grade. The children who were enrolled in the academic preschools scored lower on academic tests, were more likely to be in special education, and were more likely to get in trouble at school. The researchers believe that the type of preschools that these students attended–academically focused programs that rely on teacher-directed instruction–at least partially explain the outcomes.
I cannot say that I am surprised by the results of these studies. As a former elementary school teacher, I spent over a decade wrestling with strict mandates for standardization and high-stakes testing that ushered in scripted curriculum, robotic-like expectations for children and teachers, and ever-increasing academic standards that were developmentally inappropriate for the children in my care. It became abundantly clear to me that the test-focused, standardized, teacher-directed approach being implemented in many elementary schools and preschools was a far cry from what research tells us is best for young children–play-based education.
What is Play-Based Education?
Put simply, play-based education is an early-childhood approach that is based on the idea that young children learn through play. Rather than being understood as tangential to learning or superfluous, play is learning. In other words, the play-learning binary is dissolved.
Supported by a vast body of research, play-based education is a popular and well-documented approach to early learning programs. However, it is important to understand what is meant by “play.” According to educational researchers, play is characterized by 5 qualities:
It is freely chosen and directed by the children
Play is always creative and often imaginative
It is intrinsically motivated (i.e, children engage in it for its own sake, not for some sort of reward or extrinsic motivator)
Play is structured by rules within the player’s mind
It is active and conducted in a low-stress state
Thus, in a play-based preschool, most of the opportunities for play are not teacher-led, teacher-directed, or teacher-chosen. This is an important distinction to consider when thinking about how play-based programs are implemented.
Play-Based Education In Action at Athens Forest Kindergarten
In the photograph above, the children are playing with mud kitchen materials. The child on the left is manipulating mud in various containers, including a bowl, a muffin tin, and a cake pan, while the child on the right is painting with mud. For some people, it might be easy to dismiss this as frivolous. However, from the perspective of a play-based educator, it is clear that the children are engaging in a number of valuable learning experiences.
For example, as the child on the left plays with the mud, he is developing mathematical reasoning skills such as estimation and numeracy. As he moves the mud from the bowl to the muffin tin, he must estimate how much mud will fit in each section of the tin. He might also count how many muffins he has made, how many are left to fill the tin, and how many muffins he needs for his friends. This means he is practicing foundational numeracy skills, such as counting, one-to-one correspondence, addition and subtraction, and potentially even division if he considers how to distribute the muffins to his friends. His work with the muffin tin is also providing experience with an array, which is a foundational skill for multiplication.
Additionally, he is strengthening his fine motor skills by using his hands to manipulate the mud in various ways, while simultaneously strengthening his social and interpersonal skills. As he plays alongside his peers, he engages in sophisticated imaginative play that requires collaboration, compromise, and empathy as they construct imaginary scenarios in which they each play distinct roles. These conversations are also promoting language skills, which supports literacy.
In Georgia, educators often use the GKIDS Readiness Checklist to assess children’s readiness for kindergarten. The learning that is taking place through play in this photograph is related to many of the GKIDS Readiness indicators, including the following items:
Engages in independent activities and continues tasks over a period of time.
Plays cooperatively with a few peers for a sustained period of time.
Uses senses to observe, classify, and learn about objects and environment.
Effectively uses words, sentences, and actions to communicate needs, ideas, opinions, and preferences.
Performs fine-motor tasks that require small-muscle strength and control.
Uses spoken language that can be understood with ease.
Recites numbers up to 20 in sequence.
Counts at least 10 objects using one-to-one correspondence.
In this single photograph, we are able to identify numerous forms of learning that are occurring through play. Imagine how much learning takes place over the course of an entire day at Athens Forest Kindergarten!
If you would like to learn more about the importance of play in early childhood and play-based education, you might enjoy the following resources:
Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills
5 ways that play helps kids succeed in school
Crisis in the Kindergarten
Early Academic Training Produces Long-Term Harm | Psychology Today
https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/articles/play-based-learning-vs-academics-in-prescho
https://learningthroughplay.com/
References
Almon, J. (2004). The vital role of play in early childhood education. The developing child: The first seven years, 85-94.
Bodrova, E., & Leong, D. J. (2005). The importance of play: Why children need to play. Early Childhood Today, 20(1), 6-7.
Darling-Hammond, L., & Snyder, J. (1992). Curriculum Studies and the Traditions of Inquiry: The Scientific Tradition. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Curriculum (pp. 41-78). Macmillan, 1992.
Durkin, K., Lipsey, M. W., Farran, D. C., & Wiesen, S. E. (2022). Effects of a statewide pre-kindergarten program on children’s achievement and behavior through sixth grade. Developmental Psychology, 58(3), 470–484.
Gunnarsdottir, B. (2014). From play to school: Are core values of ECEC in Iceland being undermined by ‘schoolification’. International Journal of Early Years Education, 22(3), 242–250.
Hirsch-Pasek, K., Michnick Golinkoff, R., Berk, L., & Singer, D. G. (2009). A mandate for playschool learning in preschool. Presenting the evidence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Isenberg, J. P., & Quisenberry, N. (2002). A position paper of the Association for Childhood Education International PLAY: Essential for all Children. Childhood Education, 79(1), 33-39.
Lester, S., & Russell, W. (2010). Children's Right to Play: An Examination of the Importance of Play in the Lives of Children Worldwide. Working Papers in Early Childhood Development, No. 57.
Nicolopoulou, A. (2010). The alarming disappearance of play from early childhood education. Human Development, 53, 1–4.
Rubin, K.H., Fein, G.G., & Vanderberg, B. (1983). Play. In E. M. Hetherington (Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology (Vol 4) (pp. 693-774). Wiley.