The Importance of Play in the Classroom...

In today's classrooms, especially from grades one on up, there is a lot of 'business' that MUST get done.  Besides teaching, teachers are required to pre-test, and post test students over lessons.  The testing results are expected to show a mastery of the lesson taught.  Students are expected to sit in their desks, following the rules: quietly sitting, not bothering their neighbors and staying on task.  Time for students to create seems to have vanished with the extra recess part of the day at most schools.

In an article from Reading Research Quarterly, Dr. Karen E. Wohlwend (2008) documented the importance of play in learning within a kindergarten classroom.  Specifically, Dr. Wohlwend goes on to say that playing school at school is an important tool for students.  In playing school the students pair up reading and playing as reading-to-play, and playing-to-read.  Students showed these disciplines connected by reading books, reading charts, pretending to be the teacher, and by teaching pretend students.  In these ways, students made sense of books and multimedia, as well as produced social spaces where they indicated how kindergarteners should acts as readers and writers, leaders and followers, or boys and girls.

If these practices in a kindergarten room reinforce peer learning and set the stage for norms expected within the classroom, why is it that school districts feel teachers should act more as disciplinarians and less like facilitators of knowledge bearers?  Why are students expected to sit and be spoken at all day long?  How drab.

I understand the importance of being able to account for what our students are learning, and agree that tests are a quick and easy way to test knowledge.  But I feel there are also other ways our students can show what they learn.  I feel deeper learning happens when students are allowed to learn through inquiry, and study topics that matter to them.  Upper elementary students still need play in their lives.  I hope to be able to facilitate playing-to-learning within my classroom through role playing.  To learn about different cultures and groups who shaped our history, and to grasp the important lessons to be learned, my classroom will transform into those different cultures.  As an example, when studying Indiana history, we shall become members of tribes or explorers from the early days of Indiana.  We will write about our experiences in authentic ways, keeping journals, writing letters, reading recipes.  We will read stories that connect us, our classroom, to our community of long ago.

I believe no child benefits from being seated at their desk the entire school day.  Truly, most adults in the real world function by interacting with others.  Most adults are not in stationary positioned all day long either.  Why then do we expect that of our students?   In order for our students to become active learners, they need to be inspired by teachers who are willing to interact with them.

~ltk

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” 
                                                                                        ― Benjamin Franklin

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reference:

Wohlwend, K. E. (2008) . Kindergarten as Nexus of Practice: A Mediated Discourse Analysis of Reading, Writing, Play and Design in an Early Literacy .  Reading Research Quarterly, 43(3) , pp. 332-334 . Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20068350?uid=3739664&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103781288033

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