On 'Global School Play Day,' These Local Children Take Charge

On February 3, Shore Country Day School students from pre-k to first grade join tens of thousands of other children around the world to participate in Global School Play Day 2016, an entire day of unstructured, child-generated discovery and exploration.

“As educators,” Shore kindergarten teacher and Early Childhood Coordinator Elizabeth MacCurrach says, ”we are lucky to work at a school that understands the importance of play and provides its students with plenty of time for recess and free-choice activities. Like the founders of this movement, we are all too aware that an increasing number of schools around the country, and the world, do not.”

The global special occasion and the movement behind it are based on the work of Dr. Peter Gray, who argues in his book Free to Learn and in a well known TEDx talk that today’s children do not grow up playing enough, and that this has negatively impacted them in many ways.

Gray contends, “Children come into this world burning to learn, equipped with the curiosity, playfulness, and sociability to direct their own education. Yet we have squelched such instincts in a school model originally developed to indoctrinate, not to promote intellectual growth.”

He believes that in order to nurture in children the skills to thrive in today’s world, we must entrust them to steer their own learning and development. Drawing on evidence from anthropology, psychology, and history, Gray demonstrates that free play is a primary means by which children learn to control their lives, solve problems, get along with peers, and become emotionally resilient.

It’s no surprise that these ideas are a natural fit in Shore’s Lower School, where unstructured play and child-guided discovery are a major part of every day, all year long. On Global School Play Day, teachers in pre-k through first grade will take that philosophy one step further: children will be completely free to make their own decisions about how to spend their class time, with as little teacher intervention as possible. They’ll even be allowed to bring in favorite toys from home.

“Unstructured play is essential to children’s healthy development,” emphasizes MacCurrach. “It provides opportunities for problem solving, critical thinking, self­-expression, imagination, and creativity. Whether it’s figuring out how to make the roof of a cave of blankets stay put, or negotiating who will assume which role in a make-­believe game, children build important social and cognitive thinking skills as they play. These are the same skills that leading education researchers say correlate with success and happiness throughout life.”

Longtime Shore pre-k teacher Beth White agrees, and cites the work of child development specialist James L. Hymes, Jr.: “Play for young children is not recreation activity. It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity. Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time, problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.”

Parents and teachers may join in the global day of play by following the Twitter hashtag #GSPD2016 on February 3, as well as by watching Shore’s official Twitter account. Shore teachers will be sharing photos and updates from their classrooms throughout the day via social media, so they can connect with other participating schools around the state and around the world.