"Just" Play You Say?

If you haven't "officially" heard of play-based learning I'm sure you can make an educated guess as to what it is. It's the educational philosophy that young children learn best when educational objectives are integrated in to play. (I'm not going to get into the debate on what constitutes "play")

My program at school is play-based which I love. It's a philosophy I believe in and support whole-heartedly. Today in my classroom was the perfect example of how this works.

I brought in an old-school Littlest Pet Shop set today for my 4-5 yr olds to play with. They had never seen it before so I figured they would be pretty excited about a new play set. When the kids arrived instantly 5 of them swarmed the table. After letting them establish their own scripts for awhile I sat down to play with them. These 5 kids are all in the program for different things, they range from one normally developing child to a boy with a severe behaviour problem to kids with severe expressive and/or receptive language delays, etc.

I began modeling what a few of the items they hadn't touched yet were for (a hamster wheel, a magnetic ball of string for the kitten, the food dishes, etc.). These were then quickly integrated into their scripts. After a minute I noticed one child was having trouble getting a pet out of a cage.

"Oh no!" I cried. "The turtle is trapped. Who will save him?" One little boy immediately declared. "I will! Super mouse to the rescue!" & swooped over to "save" his friend. This became the most prominent theme for several minutes.

Okay, so now you're thinking. "Yeah....so? Big deal?"

Let me show you the big deal.

Something everyone of our kids struggles with are "wh" questions. These are higher-level thinking questions that are extremely difficult for many of my students to a)understand & b)answer. (eg. who, what, where, what do with, when, why)

To answer "who" they first need to understand that this is referring to a person & then they need to answer the correct person. So every time from then on that they called out, "Who will save me?" & looked up at their friends they were cementing in their minds that "who" means person. Yay!

Second, another huge thing these kids struggle with is peer interactions. They're usually quite comfortable interacting with adults & asking them for help, etc. They often freeze up & have no idea what to do when faced with peers. They don't make eye contact, they don't ask full questions (if they want a toy they walk near the child and while staring at the floor say "please", ummm, not effective). This simple script that they happily played for a good chunk of the afternoon worked on huge, important goals for these kids. And guess what, they had no idea they were "learning".

This was just the beginning. The afternoon was so amazing & they learned so much. It's days like this that I love my job!!