Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play IS serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood. - Fred Rogers
Play is more than just fun; it’s the serious business of childhood, a magical learning adventure where children learn, explore and discover the world and their place within it.
St Margaret’s Pre-Prep program ensures that our inquisitive four- and five-year-olds have ample opportunities to engage in both structured and unstructured play. This balanced approach allows the Pre-Preps to thrive, fostering their social, cognitive and physical growth.
Pre-Prep teacher Belinda Knowles, who completed her Masters in Play Therapy last year, explains the difference between structured vs unstructured play, each with their own developmental benefits.
‘Structured play is usually adult-led and introduces provocations or ideas for students to explore, developing their cognitive thinking and social and emotional skills. Unstructured play, on the other hand, is child-led and involves unplanned opportunities that occur naturally from a child’s interests and curiosity. Unstructured play fosters a child’s creativity, imagination, and sense of adventure.
‘Both structured and unstructured play promote numerous other developmental benefits, including fostering communication skills and fine and gross motor skills, as well as critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork, empathy, confidence, resilience, and literacy and numeracy skills.
‘This balanced approach to play provides Pre-Prep students with both explicit teaching and learning as well as a sense of agency and autonomy over their own learning – not just what they want to learn but how they want to learn and at what pace they want to engage with the curriculum,’ Belinda said.
Some of the ways in which Pre-Preps engage in structured play include:
- playing ball sports in HPE with rules and guidelines
- playing in home corner that has been set up in a particular way with particular items (e.g. a shop, a post office, etc)
- card games with rules
- music lessons where they learn beat, rhythm and rhyme
- Japanese lessons
Opportunities for unstructured play include:
- STEM where students are invited to manipulate and explore a variety of different materials and technologies
- weekly outdoor play day, during which students transfer their structured learning and explicit teaching into their unstructured day, consolidating what they have absorbed throughout the week
With the rise of technology creating significant change to the way children now live and learn, the importance of play for a child’s development has never been more paramount.
While technology does form part of the structured learning in St Margaret’s Pre-Prep, the program is largely tech free.
‘We use structured and unstructured play to almost give back childhood to the Pre-Preps,’ Belinda said.