playful learning in early childhood

Our goal is to raise learners, not students

At Rayz Kidz, we love identifying and celebrating the learning that happens in early childhood and in the home environment. If one takes a snapshot of a typical day with infants, mobile infants, toddlers, or preschool-aged children, we can see that at any given moment young children are growing, developing, and learning at a rapid pace. Learning in the early years is sometimes hard to quantify, perhaps because so much is happening all at once. For example, almost as soon as children are born, they begin their journey as expert learners. Infants study facial expressions, listen to the tone of their caregivers’ voice, and feel the pace of caregiver breathing to understand what it means to feel safe, loved, and wanted; their little arms and legs are shifting, rolling, and exploring to eventually propel them into movement; their brains are absorbing the sounds that they will need in their native language at the same time that their teeth are growing and tongue and cheek muscles forming, so that they themselves can start to produce their own words; they begin to reach for preferred toys, and observe the properties of physical world as they shake rattles and roll balls. The brain is designed for optimal learning, so infants have the capacity to build neurological connections in multiple areas at once.
 
 

What does playful learning look like?

 Children’s learning is interconnected, which means that development in one area can influence development in another, or that children might be developing in multiple areas at any given time. For example, let’s imagine that 3- and 4-year-old children are playing with recycled boxes, and they want to make a fleet of cars. They might decorate the cars with markers and stickers, add a paper plate to represent the steering wheels, and talk about driving to the grocery store. While they are engaged in this rich pretend play, they are using social skills to work together, fine motor skills to decorate the box, cognitive skills to think about the world they could explore with a car, and language to talk about their car design. They might talk about going fast or slow, or try to make a license plate to attach to the back of their cars. Without realizing it, they are naturally incorporating math and literacy into their pretend play. To us, this is a perfect snapshot of all that children absorb in playful learning!

Domains of Development

 
 We define these areas of development as social-emotional, physical, language, cognitive, math and literacy, or what we like to call school readiness. While school readiness can be a tricky topic, we like to include it in our methodology to celebrate the learning that naturally happens through play. Why can school readiness be tricky? Well, we find that the topic often gets mixed in with methodologies that we consider to be the opposite of playful learning. This might be direct instruction, or rote memorization, where a child is drilled to learn how to count the numbers 1-10, the ABC’s, or shapes at rapid speed. In the past few decades, there has been increased pressure on caregivers to prepare children for kindergarten, where children are expected to know their numbers and letters upon arrival to school. But when this learning is forced in a way that is not playful, we might find ourselves in a tough situation. For example, though a child may know how to repeat and deliver the numbers 1-10 or shapes when requested, they might not know how to apply this knowledge to everyday life. Counting and math skills have so much more meaning when they are connected to a social interaction, or to the way the world works. For example, a child might take special care to count out sparkly stones to share with a friend, or notice that round things can roll down a ramp, while square things just slide down and remain flat.

Children's learning is interconnected

We believe that play is the best way to prepare children not just for school, but for life! In our next posts, we are going to explore the different types of play and the role of the adult in playful learning.