Think back to when you were a child. How did you use to play? What games did you play? What toys did you play with? We posed these questions to the audience at our talk on Play and the Development of Life Skills at the 53rd International IATEFL Conference last week. The reaction? A lot of smiles!
Thinking about our play brings back many happy memories from our childhood. Play had a huge role in developing us as confident, competent and intelligent people, and so it is as important for our young learners as it was for us. Play can help to develop life competencies needed for success in the 21st Century. In our IATEFL talk, we looked at a few examples: communication, creative thinking and critical thinking.
Communication:
For primary learners, this involves sharing their thoughts with others to help further develop ideas. Learners need to listen, pay attention, understand and speak. To support this in your classroom, you can provide time for learners to engage in their own child-led play.
This can be done by modelling activities and relevant language, then allow the learners to replicate those activities or come up with their own, encouraging the use of language as much as possible. As learners play, ask them open-ended questions to expand their awareness, thoughts and language in a particular area: “Why are you playing this game? How do you play the game?” etc. Get learners to ask similar questions to each other.
Creative thinking:
This involves creating new content from own ideas, or using content to solve problems and make decisions. Primary learners can do this by finding uses for created objects or content in a play, story or game.There are many materials teachers can bring to class to promote this type of creative play, such as costumes, props, puppets, crafts, etc.
Storybooks are a fantastic starting point for this – there are so many ways they can be developed and used for creative activities, aside from just structured teacher-led story-time. Try getting your students to change the ending of the story and act it out!
Critical thinking:
This is about understanding and analysing links between ideas, synthesising information and evaluating arguments and options. How can we develop this through play?
Classroom activities can be structured around four actions: describe, decide, compare and explain. Applying these to your everyday activities can help to give them a critical thinking focus. An example would be to bring in real objects from home or outside of the classroom so that learners can get hands-on experience to begin understanding and critically evaluating the world around them.
If you’re teaching a lesson on food, why not bring in some real food? Learners can look, touch, smell, taste – as they’re engaging with the items, get them to focus on describing it, “How does it look? What does it feel like?” Or perhaps on comparing it to other food, “What tastes sweeter? Which one is healthier?”
Developing life skills
In summary, by providing more guided and child-led opportunities in the classroom, we can help learners to develop important life competencies as well as language and literacy skills. For more information about the theory on play and play-based learning, as well as additional examples of how to bring play into the classroom, read our new Cambridge Papers in ELT: Developing Life Skills through Play.