Use these resources and techniques to create playful learning opportunities for your students.
“WHY DO I HAVE TO DO THIS?”
Every day. Right on cue. When it was time to practice sight words, my first-grader would slide off his chair, crumple to the floor, and ask me this question.
As a reading specialist at a K-8 school, I mostly worked with students with language-based learning differences, and reading was often a difficult and emotional task for them.
What finally got my first-grader on his feet and asking, “When can we get started?” Playful learning! At all grade levels, in all subjects, educators can incorporate the pedagogy of play in the classroom to make learning more engaging, active, and joyful.
What Is Playful Learning?
According to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, playful learning is learning that encourages students to engage with content curiously, experimentally, and joyfully. It is driven by student inquiry, meaningfully connected to students’ lives, and often relies upon collaboration. In playful learning, educators and students work together to co-construct knowledge instead of learning being teacher-led.
I recently discussed why play is powerful pedagogy in a webinar, "The Power of Play: Building Student Engagement, Achievement, and Critical Thinking," and I’m excited to continue that conversation by sharing more examples of playful learning to inspire teachers.
Try these five tools to bring playful learning to your classroom!
Tool 1: Playful Learning Rubric
Whether you’re planning project-based learning, short daily activities, or multi-step assignments, you can use our Playful Learning Rubric to assess when and how you're bringing play into your classroom or school.
This rubric is based on the research of Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Helen Shwe Hadani and includes six fundamental criteria for gauging student success in the context of playful learning:
Having this rubric on hand is a great way to organize your observations about student engagement and progress. While you’ll probably be able to intuit if your students are having fun and learning deeply, the rubric will help you articulate specific examples to share with parents, caregivers, and administrators. You’ll also be able to give more detailed student feedback and intervene more quickly when learning gets off track.
Download the Playful Learning Rubric
Tool 2: Multi-Sensory Instruction
Another way to cultivate playful learning in your classroom is through multi-sensory instruction, a form of learning that engages more than one sense at a time. Since multi-sensory learning requires students to use multiple senses, the skills and information they acquire are likelier to stick because more parts of their brains are activated.
Multi-sensory learning can be brief—an activity here and there that combines tactile, visual, and auditory learning—or it can be more expansive and project-based. Here are a few quick multi-sensory activities I used with my students during reading instruction:
Playful learning through multi-sensory activities activated my students' attention and engagement—and led to many more smiles and laughs!—in ways that traditional instruction could not.
Almost anything can serve as a multi-sensory learning tool if we attach it to learning goals—from rolling hula hoops while learning about pi in math class to using maps, music, and virtual tours in world language classes.
Tool 3: Zorbit’s Math
Playful learning can also happen when you supplement your instruction with fun, innovatively-designed learning software. Zorbit’s Math is a play-based teaching tool for K-6 math educators that fosters rich, student-centered learning experiences.
One feature of Zorbit's Math that stands out among adaptive math software is that math is embedded in the play rather than acting as a barrier to play.
In one Zorbit’s Math game, students travel through space to the planet of Aurora Farms, a world focused on multiplicative reasoning. Students must water the garden by interacting with multiplication expressions, immediately getting visual feedback on how their solutions align with what each problem is asking them. This game supports active, engaged, and iterative learning by giving students ongoing opportunities to generate and test new solutions as they play.
Tool 4: Fast ForWord
Like Zorbit’s Math, Fast ForWord is adaptive, personalized learning software you can use to supplement your classroom instruction. Fast ForWord teaches K-12 students cognitive skills alongside reading and language skills while incorporating the facets of playful learning.
According to Brain Lab Coordinator Albert Jackson of Canyon View School in California, “Fast ForWord not only builds students’ language and literacy skills, it builds executive function skills as well. It’s also fun, so they’re able to play while learning.”
In the Flying Fish exercise in Fast ForWord, students build automaticity with decoding and high-frequency word recognition by joining a pelican for a day of fishing on the lake. As fish with words on them fly across the screen, students help the pelican make his catch by listening to a target word and then clicking the fish that matches that word before it flies off the screen. The exercise is designed to support two critical elements of playful learning: it helps students stay active and engaged as they filter out distractions in order to focus on reading and catching the right fish.
Tool 5: Socratic Seminars
Teacher Elfie Israel defines Socratic seminars as “formal discussions, based on a text, in which the leader asks open-ended questions. Within the context of the discussion, students listen closely to others, think critically for themselves, and articulate their own responses.”
Socratic seminars ask students to be curious, collaborative, and exploratory, all facets of playful learning. Iterative in nature, they require participants to continually revise their thinking as they listen to their peers and connect others’ ideas to their own. And, as any teacher who’s participated in a successful Socratic seminar knows, they’re fun!
Socratic seminars work well in every subject. While they're common in English, history, and world language classes, the efficacy of using Socratic seminars in science classes is well-documented. They can even be part of math class.
Not sure how to get started with Socratic seminars? Check out this article on how to ask the types of questions that will get your students talking to each other in no time.
Work Hard, Play Hard
When I think about how my students started the school year—insecure about their reading skills and not excited about their work—versus how they closed out the year, I know that playful learning was the way to go.
Learning isn’t all fun and games, but adding more playful learning to our classrooms can encourage students to tackle challenges with confidence and joy.
Megan Jensen is a former reading specialist with experience developing K-12 writing instruction and blended professional development for adults across the United States, as well as literacy and library programming abroad. Her work continues to uphold her belief that every student can learn and that there is transformative power in supporting students in reading and writing about their worlds. She holds a B.A. in English from UCLA and an M.A. in International and Comparative Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Explore more related to this authorPlayful learning through multi-sensory activities activated my students' attention and engagement—and led to many more smiles and laughs!—in ways that traditional instruction could not.
Megan Jensen, Director of Instructional Design and Former Reading Specialist
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