OKLAHOMA CITY — For two hours Sept. 23, members of the state House of Representatives’ Education Committee heard why PlayDoh, paper airplanes and Settlers of Catan need to make a comeback in Oklahoma classrooms.
“Anyone who has talked to me over the past year has most likely heard about ‘play-based learning,’” state Rep. Jacob Rosecrants (D-Norman) said. “We know children don’t learn the same. This different approach to education has shown a lot of success not just in education outcomes but also in overall engagement and mental health of our students.”
The author of an interim study on the importance of incorporating play in elementary education, Rosecrants filed a bill on the topic during the 2020 legislative session, but it was among the measures that stalled out due to COVID-19. He has announced plans to re-introduce it in the 2021 session.
Multiple studies have shown that incorporating play-based learning in early elementary grades helps children build a wide range of proficiencies, including problem solving, critical thinking, social skills, fine motor skills and gross motor skills. For example, extra time on the monkey bars gives a child a chance to build up their gross motor skills. Solving a jigsaw puzzle helps a child develop and practice problem-solving skills.
As part of the Sept. 23 interim study, multiple teachers testified that they have had to reduce the role of play-based learning in their classroom in order to accommodate all of the state-mandated benchmarks, some of which do not easily lend themselves to Play-Doh or blocks.
“Rigor is not necessarily a bad word,” University of Oklahoma Laboratory Preschool Director Becca Waggoner said. “But it is often used to denigrate play.
“I’m not saying academic rigor is a bad thing. I’m just saying it can be achieved through play. Detractors see it as chaos without a goal or structure. That’s not what play is. It is incredibly intentional. It is intentional with how the classroom is set up and what we have on the shelf. It is also taking the time to build social-emotional learning.”
Before taking office, Rep. John Waldron (D-Tulsa), a member of the Education Committee, taught social studies at Booker T. Washington High School for almost 20 years. Along with incorporating games and role playing into some of his courses, his classroom would fill up with students playing Settlers of Catan, Risk and other board games during a weekly free period.
“When you introduce play and games into the classroom, the outcomes are determined by children themselves,” Waldron said. “That’s your teachable moment. That reflects the real world much more so than a teacher in front of the classroom.”
Tiffany Neal with the Oklahoma Department of Education confirmed that the state’s early childhood curriculum for science and fine arts have already been adjusted to include more opportunities to incorporate play-based learning, such as learning about a child’s environment by digging in the dirt. However, other areas, such as math and language arts, are still missing those encouraging references.
“We want to work with the State Department of Education,” Rosecrants said. “I’m not looking to standardize play – that’s a nightmare idea. We just want to refocus on play as the most rigorous way to learn.”