The Learning Hidden in Play

The United Nations declared June 11, 2024 as the first-ever annual International Day of Play, with 140 co-sponsoring countries. The announcement illustrates the growing global movement around the importance and benefits of play. Rather than another “to-do” to add on to busy days, a pedagogy of play based in the science of learning can offer a way of approaching instruction that fundamentally improves children’s lives.

We know from research that play is a critical component of healthy cognitive and social-emotional development. It promotes self-regulation and executive functioning, develops 21st-century skills such as collaboration, communication, and critical thinking, supports social-emotional well-being, and even enhances academic outcomes like early language development and math skills.

However, young children's opportunities for play are declining. In his book The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt outlines reasons for “the beginning of the end of play-based childhood.” According to Haidt, worried parents are removing opportunities for autonomous play, and as a result, their children are spending less time playing both inside and outside the home, leading children to become more sedentary, unhappy, and anxious.

Often, instead of engaging in physical or in-person play, kids are spending time on screens. Soaring rates of technology use are seen as a crisis for teens, but even two- to eight-year-olds are spending an average of 2.5 to 3 hours on screen media daily. Add this to the closure of many afterschool programs due to persistent staffing shortages and you have a real play crisis at the same time as children’s mental health problems are on the rise and happiness levels have taken a dive.

The science of learning tells us that restoring children’s opportunities for joyful, intentional play—using a rigorous, research-based approach called Playful Learning—has the potential to improve children’s academic and social-emotional outcomes, at a time when doing so is particularly important. Decades of research on the science of Playful Learning show that children benefit most from a “balanced diet” of play opportunities across a spectrum of playful instruction, guided play, and free play:

• In classrooms, play-based instruction can make curricula joyful and rigorous;
• Both in and out of school, guided play, which includes activities that are initiated by adults but directed by children, can teach academic skills through real-world activities, such as sorting crayons or counting change; and
• Free play empowers children to decide how to play without relying on time or resources from an adult, enhancing autonomy and self-regulation.

It’s clear that play benefits kids, and yet they have access to an ever-declining amount of it as early as kindergarten. Within the school day, “schoolification” and an overemphasis on academic achievement often squeeze out recess and opportunities for children to learn through exploration. One hypothesis for this decline is that educators feel they have to make an either/or choice: play or learning. This false dichotomy harms children and fails to see what science has long known—for young children, play is learning.

For example, kindergarten teachers can try to teach students early literacy skills while they sit at desks doing worksheets, or they can use a curriculum from Tools of the Mind, which emphasizes make-believe play, creativity, and collaboration in order to teach young kids both academic and self-regulation skills. Math teachers can practice fractions and multiplication skills on the whiteboard, or they can engage students in playful learning through NBA Math Hoops, an interactive STEM enrichment game that uses basketball to improve math proficiency in fourth- through eighth- grade students. And science teachers can rely solely on textbooks to explain photosynthesis, or they can partner with Out Teach, which installs outdoor learning labs that transform unused spaces on school grounds into herb and vegetable gardens where students compare and contrast the characteristics and needs of various organisms and discover science in action. All these programs, which receive funding from Overdeck Family Foundation, have play and inquiry-based learning at their center. But they also show the ability to support academic and social-emotional skills and are highly engaging, something that is particularly important at a time of decreased engagement and striking chronic absenteeism.

High-quality early childhood environments already recognize the essential role of play in children’s development. In fact, you can often hear the classrooms led by skilled educators before you see them, because the sound of joyful learning echoes out of the room and into the hallway. But encouraging the full spectrum of play as children grow and class sizes increase can be challenging. Some teachers might understand the importance of play but don’t see how it’s possible to integrate it into an already packed school day, filled with standards to cover, wide ranges of student proficiency levels, mental health and behavior challenges, and intensive assessments. And it’s true that many teachers are already asked to go above and beyond in a myriad of ways.

But even if the constraints can’t change, educators, especially in elementary school, can and should look for opportunities within the confines of a typical day to make learning more playful. These could be pedagogical shifts, encouraging experiential or project-based learning opportunities aligned to the content children are already learning. Even small changes, such as bringing a story to life by acting it out, using manipulatives to break down math concepts through child-directed math games, or following children’s interests by incorporating topics that excite them into the content they need to learn, can make a big difference in creating a playful learning environment in the classroom.

Incorporating play into the school day would not only invigorate the classroom experience for students and teachers, but could also move the needle on student achievement in a way our education system has often struggled to do. Increasing children’s social-emotional well-being, engagement, and happiness while fostering foundational learning—that’s something we should all line up for.