So, you’ve heard the method thrown around in friend circles, book pages, and childhood development experts: play-based learning. And in theory – it sounds great. What’s not to love about fostering independence, discovery, and exploration through games, pretend, art, and outdoor play?
But theory is very different from reality, and there’s that niggling sense of doubt that you just can’t ignore. Sure, you could see play-based learning working well for toddlers and preschoolers. But what about your elementary-aged kid? Surely a pedagogy rooted in play couldn’t possibly be “enough” for a 6-7-year old, right?
Wrong.
Today, we’re unpacking a host of fears and anxieties you might be entertaining as you navigate the best type of education for your 6-7-year-old. Read on to find out what play-based learning is (and what it’s not), how it works, and why it’s proven to be one of the most effective learning pedagogies for homeschoolers worldwide.
So what is play-based learning?
To put it simply, play-based learning is learning through play. Based on a Vygotskian model, it’s a term used in both education and psychology to describe how a child can learn to make sense of the world around them. Like us, kids learn best through first-hand experiences. By facilitating purposeful play, this method can motivate, stimulate, and support a child in development of skills, concepts, language acquisitions, communication skills and concentration. Moreso, the model also provides a holistic boost, allowing children to develop positive attitudes and to demonstrate awareness or usage of recent skills and competencies – at any life stage.
But here’s what it’s NOT…
Play-based learning isn’t free play. It’s not as simple as throwing your hands up in the air and leaving a child up to his/her own devices all day long. Instead, play-based learning is a form of guided play, in which a parent (or teacher) often facilitates additional learning opportunities as play extensions. (This is 100% why we provide daily lesson prompts in our all-in-one curriculum.)
Let’s say, for example, siblings are engaged in a LEGO build. With free play, a parent might leave the room and occupy herself elsewhere. With play-based learning, a parent might quietly observe and pepper in a few questions to encourage problem solving, prediction, and hypothesizing – or to bring an awareness towards mathematics, science, and literacy concepts, i.e. How tall can this get? How many blocks do you need? Can you blow the house down? In other words, by providing simple prompts, play is elevated from a simple stacking of blocks to the application of learning.
Play-based learning often involves an element of record-keeping for the parent/teacher (our built-in Notebook, Interest Log, and Progress Reports are perfectly designed for this!) as a means to solidify concepts and circle back to familiar foundations in an effort to move learning further toward deeper exploration.
So how does it work?
Having doubts about the efficacy of play-based learning? It might help to consider play-based learning as project-based learning. After all, it’s very similar to the cyclical process of a project we might tackle as an adult.
The truth is – true learning cannot exist when it’s void of motivation, and for many of us, motivation is born out of value. The moment we find a topic, passion, or interest valuable is the moment we become motivated to learn it. No earlier, no later. Our kids are no different!
Think about it: did we learn more about chemistry from listening to our 9th grade teacher lecture about infusion? Or did we learn more when we needed to research the safety of essential oils for our families? Likewise, our kids might not care about the migratory patterns of birds until they want to know why their favorite park is so quiet these days. They might not care about subtraction until they want to know how far $1 will go at the candy store.
Project-based learning allows a child the time and space to (a) engage in this curiosity, and (b) explore it. In other words, project-based learning teaches our children to wrestle with discovery.
As renowned psychologist and child development theorist Jean Piaget writes,“Our real problem is – what is the goal of education? Are we forming children that are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try developing creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?”
But is it effective?
YES! Dozens of recent research supports that play-based learning should extend far beyond the early years, claiming the method to be increasingly effective in learning key foundational concepts for life. For example, students following a play-based math curriculum outperformed students in control classrooms many times over. And kids following a play-based literacy curriculum were observed to utilize key vocabulary words more frequently than those taught using direct instruction.
Consider, for a moment, the natural trajectory of parenthood. We spend our child’s infant and toddler years fostering independence. We encourage our kids to potty by themselves, to wash their own hands, to brush their own teeth. In every other aspect of life, we challenge our children to take ownership over their lives. Why, then, would we not foster this same life skill in terms of their education?
Instead, we often fall into the trap of transferring ownership. After spending endless hours fostering independence, our kids enter their elementary years and – boom! – we make them sit down and listen to our instructions! What happens? We miss the fruits of our labor. We fail to give them these early years as a means to exercise what we’ve taught them. And we cut off their stems just before they bloom.
The Profundity of Play
In short: play-based and project-based learning is how your 9-year-old will discover the joy of sewing – and stumble into his own bespoke bow tie line. Or why your 8-year-old will embark on a great CEO adventure after designing a cup for her grandfather with Parkinson’s. Or how your 11-year-old’s local lemonade will sell for millions at Whole Foods.
As developmental psychologist Peter Gray writes in Free to Learn, “Perhaps play would be more respected if we called it something like “self-motivated practice of life skills,” but that would remove the lightheartedness from it and thereby reduce its effectiveness. So, we are stuck with the paradox. We must accept play’s triviality in order to realize its profundity.”
Still need proof of play’s effectiveness? Watch a quick video on how kids learn, and if you haven’t already, enjoy 3 weeks of FREE play-based prompts for your 6-and-7-year olds right here.