Self-Regulation and Play-based Learning

Enter any kindergarten classroom and you will see children engaged in different types of play – painting at the easel, sculpting play dough, splashing at the water table, playing house in the dramatic play centre.  Some children stay for long periods at one centre, while others move from place to place. The teachers circulate through the room, talking with the children and supporting their play.

Why a play-based program? Children are naturally curious and play allows them to explore, create, build, wonder and ask questions. In kindergarten, educators set up the classroom so that children are actively learning language, math, science and more through play.

How does a play-based kindergarten program help children to develop self-regulation? Just as play is a natural way for young children to learn language and math, it is a natural way for them to deal with and recover from stress.  Kindergarten educators provide many different materials and play spaces in the classroom, and allow the children to decide where they want to play and for how long. With support from the adults in the classroom, children learn which play materials help them to feel calm and which energize them.

The children at the block centre use lots of energy as they carry the blocks and move around in the zoo they have created. Their teacher knows that this will help them to be calm when it’s time to sit for lunch, as they will have released so much energy during play.

The young boy sitting quietly in the book centre is learning to self-regulate.  He has found a place in the classroom where he feels safe and calm. A recent arrival to Canada from Syria and just beginning to learn English, he isn’t ready to play just yet. 

By playing with different materials in the classroom, children learn to self-regulate.  They learn to recognize when they feel stressed and which activities will help them to feel calm. They move away from play areas that they find too loud or stressful, and choose play that meets their needs. Each student is unique, and what is calming for one student may not be calming for another student. One child may find working with play dough calming, while another child may prefer to pour sand at the sand table. With so many materials to choose from in a play-based kindergarten program, each child can find what works best for them!

(Revised -original version can be found in Self-Reg Parenting, Volume 1; Issue 3)

Self-regulation as Classroom Culture

 When I first began teaching kindergarten, I had little teddy bear cut outs at each centre to indicate the number of children who could play there.  For example, there were three chairs at the play doh table so there were three bear cut outs and three children could play there.  There were four chairs in the house centre so four bears, etc.  This is what I had been taught during my ECE training.

And what quickly happened is that I and the children spent our time policing how many children were in each centre.  "Miss, there's five people in the house centre. He came last, he has to go!'  "But she's had a long turn...." and so on and so on. 

So, my ECE partner and I decided to get rid of the teddy bears and get rid of the limits on how many children could play in each centre.  And the culture in the room shifted!!!!!!  We could focus on engaging with the children in play, and the children learned to determine what the limits were at each centre.  Sometimes a child would pull a chair from our make and take centre over to the play doh table and we might have four or five chidlren there.  On their own, they decided when there were so many people that the play doh was divided into such small portions that they couldn't really play effectively.

A few years ago I was visiting a kindergarten classroom and the teaching team had introduced a hardware store to the dramatic play centre with predrilled lumber, screwdrivers, screws and other materials.  As soon as whole group time on the carpet was done, about twenty students descended on the very small dramatic play centre.  We waited and in a few moments .... 6 or 7 students dragged some of the lumber and materials over to the tables to work on them there, about 8 children stayed in the drama centre and continued to explore and the rest wandered off to other centres.  They were able to decide if they felt playing in the house centre was worth the stress of negotiating space and materials or if they would rather wait and play there later.  All of this happened in mere moments and required no teacher intervention.

The Ontario Kindergarten Program document reminds us that children are capable and competent learners, full of potential and ready to take ownership of their learning. The classroom environment needs to reflect our belief that children are competent and capable. What limits do we really need to have in our classroom and which ones are purely arbitrary?

Here's a great article by Carol Anne Wien about teachers in a preschool centre in Ontario who found that eliminating many rules and reorganizing the physical space reduces accidents, noise, aggressive play and reduced teacher stress. This was originally published in the NAEYC's journal Young Children in January 2004.

Deanna Pecaski McLennan shares a post on her blog about how the Flow of the Day in her kindergarten classroom allows students to deepen their learning through large blocks of time.