Play Based Learning

PLAY-BASED LEARNING: PRODUCING CRITICAL, CREATIVE AND INNOVATIVE THINKERS

Go inside any primary school classroom and look for the ‘play’. Where is it? When did we become so serious with our students and forget to include play? It was only 15 years ago that we could go into any Year 1 classroom and find children playing with play-dough and creating the most spectacular creatures, painting a masterpiece or gluing together toilet rolls to make a spaceship. They were engaging with each other, negotiating, sorting out arguments and establishing friendships. They were imagining, exploring and inventing. It was through taking risks, discovering new ideas and putting these ideas into action that learning took place.

Now it seems such acts of play are a thing of the past. We walk into a typical classroom and find containers of maths equipment that only come out at maths time, musical instruments gathering dust while they wait for the designated timeslot to learn percussion and Lego in buckets under the reading shelves waiting to be used on rainy days.

Reminds me of the early 2000s when we were schooling our primary students in ICT and HOTS and sending them to high school and watching all that enthusiasm for learning and thinking disappear - declaring that we wished the high schools would have a re-think about how they could do more of what we were doing...

EDIT (MAY 2015): This is on my current reading list - adding it here in the event I forget to get back to it now