By Lauren Russell, Early Childhood Team Leader

Have you ever asked your child, “What did you do today?” and they respond with a simple one-word answer… “played”. What does that mean, what did they play, who did they play with? This simple word can carry so much weight, yet be so ambiguous. 
 

What is play?
"Play" can refer to a wide range of activities that are engaged in for enjoyment, amusement, recreation, or relaxation. Essentially a voluntary activity, for adults and children alike, that brings joy. In early childhood, play is an essential tool for learning, creating, experimenting, and healthy risk taking. 

What does play look like in the NPES preschool classroom?
Play is at the root of every part of the preschool day. Play begins at morning arrival time with an hour of daily gross motor play on the playlot. To the untrained eye it looks like children running, chasing, digging, climbing, biking, and sometimes exploring the play lot with peers. To the trained eye, this is an essential space to develop a variety of foundational school readiness skills. Physically, outdoor gross motor play develops the large muscle groups like a child’s core, back, legs, and arms. Our daily outdoor time translates in the classroom to improved concentration, better self-regulation, increased engagement, and the development of social emotional skills. Children who have had a chance to move their bodies and expend energy, are regulated and ready to learn—wait, but first they must have a snack!  Okay, no , now they are ready to learn. 

After our gross motor play and snack, we meet daily as a class for the Morning Meeting. During Morning Meeting kids practice school readiness skills such as sitting and active listening, speaking with relevance, practicing body awareness in a small space, and being engaged members of our classroom community. Throughout the day we schedule purposeful short blocks of activity, followed by focused learning, and back to movement and activity again. Weaving in energizing activities with concentrated tasks is essential for the brain and body development of young learners, not to mention the playfulness in learning how to move their bodies mindfully and skillfully.

Free Choice:
At NPES our play-based Reggio Emilia inspired program prepares our youngest learners for future success by offering expertly curated play-focused curriculum, designed by our students themselves. Our ever changing curriculum has led us to studies ranging from ice cream to outer space and from ants to soup. Designing curriculum based on the students interests leads to engaged, invested, and joyful learning in our students. It’s also inspiring and fresh for the teachers.

Daily our preschoolers engage in literacy, math, science, sensory, and social-emotional growth through playful centers. Gone are the days of “Letter of the Day,” rote memorization and drills, as research shows that these methods don’t produce understanding and skills that last. We teach through play, engagement, exposure, inquisition, and interest. Play meets learning when we transform our dramatic play area into an ice cream store. Isn’t math more fun when you’re the cashier counting out five construction paper dollars, or the chef measuring out two cups of carrots diced by your peers? 

Literacy learning explodes when kids are in charge of creating and writing a name for a wooden boat they built and tested in a sink or float experiment. Social-emotional development becomes more meaningful when a child has to negotiate how many seats are available on the class submarine made out of a donated cardboard box. This type of exploratory play is where lasting, useful, and energizing learning takes place.

Important learning happens not when the teacher is lecturing and spouting information, but when the children are leading the play and pursuing their curiosities, with the teachers in a supporting role. 

Along with creative emergent play in our classrooms, you will see a variety of centers that are teacher curated to develop specific skills. Whether it be fine-motor based centers, teacher-guided projects, or our Art Studio, there is an area in the classroom for every type of growth. We find that some of our most “high interest” areas—from the kitchen center to the building stations—are where preschoolers are doing some of their highest level critical thinking. Our building areas, for example, inspire big, math-based ideas related to geometry, symmetry, categorizing, and patterning, all while simply “playing”. 

These popular centers are also where a large part of our social-emotional curriculum is modeled and practiced. Imagine having a grand idea of building a double-decker castle while having to share your Magna-Tiles with twenty-three other four-year-olds, all with different ideas. What if a rogue foot knocks down your “rocket launcher” that you have spent time building. While big feelings of disappointment might occur, our youngest learners practice a variety of strategies such as, taking a breath, rebuilding, or asking peers to help. A preschooler’s day is a revolving door full of choices and negotiations. As early childhood experts and teachers, we model with intention how to respond to these unexpected, upsetting scenarios for young children. Play can elicit every emotion you can imagine, joy, humor, sadness, uncertainty, love, frustration, satisfaction, shame, and more. It is so much more than having fun. Play, while often fun, is essential to the learning and development of preschoolers, preparing them for success throughout elementary school and beyond. So next time you ask your child, “What did you do today?” and they respond, “We played,” know that it was so much more than just play.

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