learning through play

Thank you for awarding me the grant to participate in Deb Curtis and Nadia Jaboneta’s Learning Community. I took this course during my first year as an assistant teacher in our Early Childhood Program’s 2s class, and I found these six sessions incredibly valuable. The insights I gained continue to inform my practice today as a teacher.

When I received the list of The Orchard’s Learning Communities last fall, Deb and Nadia’s co-op caught my attention. I had recently heard colleagues discuss schema theory and was fascinated by how their understanding of these patterns of play informed the invitations they created for their students. I had just purchased Nadia and Deb’s book, Children’s Lively Minds: Play Schema Made Visible, and was especially excited to have the opportunity to learn from the authors directly.

The examination of play schemas was a favorite part of the course and helped me reframe how I view my students’ play. Actions that I once might have stopped—such as throwing mulch in our mud kitchen or spinning glue containers across the table—I now recognize as important patterns of play that help children build cognitive, social, and emotional skills. While I may still need to step in and guide children toward safer choices (“I see you are having fun throwing. Let’s find you a ball or something softer you can throw.”), I now understand how to support and foster the rich schema exploration taking place.

One example stands out. One morning before school, my lead teacher carefully arranged vessels of colored water and pipettes in front of a pristine piece of white foam. I assumed the students would enter the classroom, pick up the pipettes, and carefully drip small amounts of color onto the foam to explore color mixing. Instead, L. walked in, looked at the activity, and promptly dumped all the colors onto the foam at once.

My first instinct was to redirect her. Instead, I paused and realized that L. was clearly exploring a transporting schema. In our kitchen area, she often filled metal pots with wooden vegetables and dumped them onto the floor or into baskets across the room. Outside, she loaded dump trucks with mulch and transported the loads from one place to another. Of course it would be exciting to dump all the colors together at once and discover what happened! Understanding the schema L. was exploring helped me become a more responsive teacher and allowed me to value her enthusiastic exploration, even though it differed from what I had originally envisioned.

Finally, discussing children’s play through the lens of schema theory helped me articulate the legitimacy of the work we do in a play-based classroom. We are not simply allowing children to direct their own activities for the sake of “free time” or “free play.” Rather, we are intentionally creating opportunities for them to engage in the schema explorations essential to their rapidly developing minds. Schema theory encourages us to better understand our students and to thoughtfully provide materials and experiences that support their growth and development.

What I ultimately enjoyed most about Deb and Nadia’s course was the way they viewed and talked about children. Deb said that children use “learning abilities that are more powerful than those of the smartest scientists and most advanced computers.” Further, children are natural empaths with deep needs for human connection and an innate knowledge of how to support one another. Our homework assignments were to find pictures that illustrated our students’ genius or to notice what we were loving in our classrooms, for, as Deb reminded us, the more we look for joy, the more we rewire our brains to see joy. I looked forward to their positivity every month and enjoyed being part of a community that views children and teaching the same way I do.

Kristen Gottstein, Teacher, Temple Sinai Early Childhood Education Program Summit, NJ