Connecticut teachers want you to know that “ play-based learning ” is not an oxymoron. For years child development and education experts have praised the benefits of play-based learning — a pedagogy that drives organic and lasting academic growth through activities that spark curiosity, engagement and joy in young students. This school year, preschool, kindergarten and elementary classrooms across the state will introduce play-based learning as a result of twin provisions in two bills passed by the Connecticut General Assembly in 2023.
The legislation makes Connecticut one of only two states in the nation with an explicit commitment to play-based learning in statute. The new law establishes play-based learning as a mandatory part of daily instruction in preschool and kindergarten. It also compels local boards of education to allow teachers in grades one through five to incorporate play-based learning into their classrooms.
According to the law, the play-based approach will focus on implementing “developmentally appropriate strategies that can be integrated with existing learning standards,” through “free play, guided play and games” that are “predominantly free of the use of mobile electronic devices.” As Connecticut schools continue to struggle with declining test scores , a growing youth mental health crisis, and a persistent teacher shortage , educators are confident that play-based learning will allow the state to meet children at their current needs and equip future generations with the skills needed to thrive in our rapidly changing world. It’s not many people’s first instinct to align the word “play” with learning.
For most, “play” conjures images of beloved games and laughter during recess — not mastering skills in the classroom. Joslyn DeLancey, the vice president of the Connecticut Education Association , wants administrators, teachers and parents to cast off these preconceptions and embrace a new word in the play lexicon — rigor. “Somewhere along the line, people confused the word rigor for hard or difficult, and they confused the word play for something that was fun and easy,” DeLancey said.
“We’ve changed school to mean hard and (think) it’s only good if it’s hard, and that’s not actually true. Things can be hard, but also playful and fun and exciting.” DeLancey said people need to understand that play-based learning is “not lazy learning.
” “Play is actually very rigorous because when kids are playing, they’re challenging their thinking, they’re building new ideas, it’s creating different synapses in the brain that trigger different thinking and thoughts and ideas (that) actually build agency and independence,” DeLancey added. Under the play-based model, students take agency over their education and direct their own learning while teachers provide materials, ask questions and guide their students through key academic concepts. It is also low barrier.
Unlike other teaching methods that require schools to purchase textbooks and other learning equipment, play-based learning relies on students’ creativity and imagination to transform found materials such as cardboard boxes, cans, sticks, rocks and water into tools that drive their learning. Above all, DeLancey said play-based learning allows educators to meet students where they are to and cultivate academic growth. “Let’s say we’re doing something like sorting, you might have a student who’s super advanced who can sort the rocks in groups of two and count by twos in preschool.
You might have another one who looks at the rocks and goes, ‘These are pink, these are blue — I’m going to separate them by color,’” Delancey said. “They’re still sorting, they’re still kind of doing the same task, even though one’s thinking might be in a different space than the other.” As another example, DeLancey said a child who has trouble sitting still during the school day can thrive in an active play-based classroom where they are not expected to sit in a desk all day.
DeLancey said that oftentimes in traditional classrooms, students “Cannot access the learning, not because their brains aren’t ready for it, but because we’ve set up a system that denies them access.” “Play will give them that (access),” DeLancey said. “When students are able to play, it allows for every student to access the learning point where they are.
” Jaclyn Valley is the director of Early Childhood Initiatives at Stowe Early Learning Center for Enfield Public Schools. Valley said the center’s pre-k classrooms cultivate playful environments that support independence, persistence, executive function and cognitive flexibility. Valley explained how the center integrates intentional play scenarios and schemes into the yearly curriculum.
When students studied properties of matter and concepts such as density through sinking and floating different materials, Valley said the center facilitated this learning by transforming the classroom into “space.” One section of the room might turn into the surface of the moon, where children walk on “moon shoes” by fastening sponges or buckets to their sneakers. Another section might be a NASA research lab, where students take on the role of a scientist and study and experiment on samples taken from puddles or rocks found outside.
This year, Valley said her preschoolers added an astronaut training center after deciding “that astronauts have to stay fit” during the student’s background-building work. Valley said they taped a stopwatch to the wall, fastened a cardboard box to the floor and made a treadmill to run on. Each morning, Valley said students work with their teachers to set their intentions for the day.
They embody their roles while they play, actively record their thinking and then reflect on what they have learned before school ends. The teachers help guide students and direct them with questions to explore deeper concepts and ideas. Valley said the special part about a play-based classroom is it eliminates barriers created by people’s lived experiences in ways that traditional instruction cannot.
“If I have never heard about an astronaut, but somebody else had gone to museums and read books (about space) their whole life, you’re still going to be getting the same information and you’re learning from your peers, but you’re also learning from your teacher and other sources,” Valley explained. Valley said the impact extends not just to curricular concepts like science, math, language arts and social studies but also gross motor skills, language development and relationship building. Erin Kober said she saw growth in her son after he began preschool at Stowe Early Learning Center’s Head Start program last fall.
Kober said her 4-year-old was “a shy kid coming in.” Now, Kober said she sees her son “interacting with peers independently without any adult help or prompting.” “That’s definitely, (something) I attribute it to the different play schemes that they were able to practice throughout the year,” Kolbert said.
“It gives them opportunities to practice different social skills and social communication in ways that maybe they wouldn’t (otherwise).” Whether the classroom’s creative centers were built around a recycling center, a grocery store or a bowling alley, Kobert said her son “always looked forward to whatever was coming next.” “I was just amazed when he came home talking about the primary colors — things that you wouldn’t even think a preschooler would take interest in,” Kolber said.
When Jamie Hocking introduced play-based learning to her second-grade students at Highland Elementary School in Wallingford, it transformed the class. Hocking challenged her students to summarize “Room On The Broom” by Julia Donaldson using found materials. At first, Hocking said the students stared at the yarn and boxes and other odds and ends quizzically, unsure of how they would accomplish their task.
As the week progressed, Hocking saw her students work through the challenge, enhancing their collaboration and problem-solving skills, all while incorporating the academic standards for the class — and they were having fun doing it. Hocking said the most significant change was her students’ interpersonal skills. Hocking saw students start to communicate their wants and needs as bickering transformed into “a lot of thoughtful conversations” and cooperation.
“That lasted throughout the year,” Hocking said. “Any other time that we did anything that was play-based, whether we were working in math concepts or science or social studies, everything just seemed to really work well when we were together and doing any sort of problem-solving tasks that needed to be done.” As Hocking helps teachers across the state prepare to integrate play-based strategies in their own classrooms, Hocking said sometimes she has to remind even her own colleagues that “play is OK.
” “I had put out an all-call for some materials for play-based learning. And one of my dear friends came to me and said, ‘You can’t ask for that stuff. We, we don’t do play here,” Hocking recounted.
“I said, ‘It’s a law and it’s going to be in effect next year.’ She goes, ‘But they took everything away. It’s all gone.
There’s no more blocks, there’s no more PlayStations, it’s gone. All of it.” “The fear in her was real,” Hocking said.
Connecticut Education Association Teacher Development Specialist Kate Field explained that play was systematically erased from early elementary school classrooms roughly 12 years ago to create learning environments that aligned with standardized testing. “The kindergarten that many individuals think back on is very different from the kindergarten, the first grade, the second grade that is the reality for young children today,” Field said. “Today.
..kids are coming in and they’re sitting in a chair and they’re getting direct instruction for the vast majority of the day.
” Field said the ramifications of that decision have reverberated into “stagnant test scores, a widening achievement gap,” and a “profound negative impact” on student socio-emotional health. Peg Oliveira, the director of the Gesell Program in Early Childhood at the Yale Child Study Center, said that classrooms turned into “boot camps” for the academic outcomes and data schools sought to measure. “Rather than measuring what we value, we often value what we know how to measure,” Oliveira said.
“Creativity, problem-solving, collaboration — those kinds of skills are the skills that we now understand are necessary for success in lifelong learning. But those are really hard to measure. What we do know how to measure is ABCs and 123s.
” Oliveira said that research has shown that play-based learning is among the most effective modes of instruction that allow students to absorb content and skills, hit learning goals and maintain long-term academic growth. “While sometimes in an academic classroom, the learning is faster, it doesn’t last,” Oliveira said. “True learning occurs when you can really engage with material at a developmentally appropriate level, experiment with it, make mistakes and learn from those mistakes genuinely.
” “If we don’t allow the children any agency in their engagement with learning materials, what we know is that the learning doesn’t stick,” Oliveira said. “When you use engaged learning, like play-based learning..
.you engage a whole new set of executive function skills that are not excited by worksheets or memorization.” Oliveira said the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has forced a reckoning in education.
Under the current academic model, Oliveira said children are burnt out, stressed and struggling. Oliveira said students who grew up during quarantine are also entering school with more challenges around socialization, executive function and self-regulation skills than kindergarteners before the pandemic. “We have to take a more holistic whole-child approach,” Oliveira said.
Field said part of the beauty of play-based learning is that it shifts education from a deficit-oriented model to a strength-based one. Field said the current education system expects children’s cognitive function to grow on a standardized timeline, which is “just not realistic.” “When (a kindergartener’s) first experience in school is to sit and be tested, they may not even be old enough to have the dexterity to hold a pencil, and yet we’re expecting them to be able to read.
And when they can’t, they may be identified as having a deficiency that may not be real because cognitively they may not be ready,” Field said. “We don’t want children’s first educational experience to be learning what they’re not good at,” Field said. “We want a child’s first educational experience to be joyful and to be learning about what they’re talented at, what strengths they can bring to the classroom.
” Field said play-based learning lends itself to this kind of discovery. While a student may not ace a test, in play-based learning, Field said children can find validation in being imaginative, funny, or “the life of the classroom.” “The wonderful thing about play is not just that it shows each child what they can do, it allows every other child in the room to see every other child,” Field said.
“In this time of a mental health crisis, (play-based learning is) a stress reliever and also an opportunity for children to interact with one another, to put devices to down and to learn and grow and to understand what it means to be human,” Field said. “When we take away play, we are taking away..
.the primary vehicle through which young children’s brains grow.” Oliveira said the goals of play-based learning extend so much further than fostering positive growth in the early grades — it’s about preparing the next generation to think critically throughout their education careers and beyond.
“Technology is moving so quickly that if we’re just building skills, we’re going to be behind,” Oliveira said. She explained that schools should be places that foster innovation, not imitation. “We can’t train kids to be imitators — to sit still to listen, do what they’re told, (and) repeat back — until they are 18 years old and then suddenly expect them to go to college and do something entirely different.
It just doesn’t work that way,” Oliveira said. “We have to start building the kinds of citizens that we want to have in 2025 now, when they’re entering preschool at four.” “What we need for the future are kids who are OK with learning being messy, making errors and persevering.
Where they don’t give up simply because they didn’t get it right the first time. Where they recognize that their ideas are good, but in collaboration with other people’s ideas, they become even better,” Oliveira added..
