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 worked with students with language-based learning differences. 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 encourages students to engage with content curiously, experimentally, and joyfully. It's driven by student inquiry, connected to their 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.
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.
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:
This rubric is a great way to organize your observations about student engagement and progress and gather 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 education that engages more than one sense at a time. The skills and information students acquire during multi-sensory instruction 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 more expansive and project-based. Here are a few 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 be 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: MATHia Adventure
Playful learning can also happen when you supplement your instruction with game-based learning software.
MATHia Adventure is an online, supplemental tool for K–6 teachers that fosters rich, student-centered mathematics experiences. Part of the comprehensive ClearMath Elementary solution, it's comprised of Zorbit’s Math Adventure for K–3 students and Mathstoria for 4–6 students.
One feature of MATHia Adventure that stands out is that the math is embedded in game-based interactions that provide authentic, applicable experiences with the content. This means that math isn’t something students see as an obstacle to overcome in order to get to the fun.
In one Zorbit’s Math Adventure 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 as they get visual feedback on how their solutions align with the task of each problem. This game supports active, engaged, and iterative learning by allowing students to generate and test new solutions as they play.
Tool 4: Fast ForWord
Like MATHia Adventure, Fast ForWord is adaptive, game-based learning software you can use to supplement classroom instruction. Fast ForWord teaches K–12 students cognitive skills alongside reading and language while incorporating 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 supports two critical elements of playful learning: it helps students stay active and engaged as they filter out distractions to focus 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. 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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