Play is an essential part of children’s life and curriculum and being able to play is considered as a symbol of children’s sound health and development. It is also known that playing enhances children’s creativity, social and emotional growth and keep them physically fit. If we look upon closely, playing is the fundamental means by which children explore and build their own understanding of the world (Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., Berk, L. E., & Singer, D. G., 2009). They start with a small game and when they start achieving success, they are excited to let the teachers know about it.
For children, playing is developing an understanding of the real-world situations, actively participating to find out workable solutions and gaining knowledge and bits of information from each other’s experiences. Here comes the role of a teacher to channelize this role playing of children towards cognitive development in future. Researches have proved that the way a teacher arranges a classroom influences the learning ability of children (Diamond, A., Barnett, W. S., Thomas, J. & Munro, S., 2007). If technical concepts can be better explained through play and nature, why the need to complicate things? When children are actively engaged in a natural environment, they are rightly involved in some physical movement which makes learning easy and quick. Some benefits of integrating play and nature into the classroom are listed below:
It’s innate in children to learn through interaction. The more the involvement of play and nature, the better learning will they takeaway
Each play has a set of developmental characteristics and the way they are organized by the teachers will help in strengthening their senses, developing raw skills, expressing emotions and role modeling to find sustainable solutions
Besides the moral learning, children also learn to explore his surroundings, ask questions and perform activities to know results. It’s a joyous experience for them that opens the door for a new form of learning (Siraj-Blatchford, I., 2009)
Despite the fact that bringing play and nature to a classroom has a lot of advantages, it’s up to the teacher to comprehend the classroom needs and strategize plays to communicate proper learning among children. For example, cooking as a play activity can be channelized to instill the act of sharing food among children or a classroom photography session should be portrayed as a model of unity and integrity (Lillard, A. & Else-Quest, N., 2006). Some other games with a set of rules should make them learn how to be competitive even in a highly challenging environment.
No matter whatever games the children play, at the end of the day it’s the learning that they take away from the lesson that holds value. Teachers should plan thoughtfully and strategically to improve the play experiences of children and turn them towards achieving their goals and objectives as individuals and as team members of a group (Hyson, M., 2008). They should know the basic principles of learning and how to create and evaluate learning sessions. This will ensure true value addition to a child’s life. Integrating play in a classroom adds a great value that helps children in understanding themselves, their roles in society and various methods of socially interacting with peers.
References
Diamond, A., Barnett, W. S., Thomas, J. & Munro, S. (2007). Preschool program improves cognitive control. Science, 318(5855), 1387- 1388.
Hyson, M. (2008). Enthusiastic and engaged learners: Approaches to learning in the early childhood classroom. New York: Teachers College Press and Washington, DC: NAEYC.
Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., Berk, L. E., & Singer, D. G. (2009) A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting the Evidence. Oxford University Press
Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2009). Conceptualizing progression in the pedagogy of play and sustained shared thinking in early childhood education: A Vygotskian perspective. Educational and Child Psychology, 26(2), 77- 89
Lillard, A. & Else-Quest, N. (2006). The early years: Evaluating Montessori education. Science, 313(5795), 1893 – 1894.
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