Play for Big Kids: 4 Ways to Encourage Play For Those Too Cool to Play
The following is a guest post from Erik Murray.
Recently, I took my two toddlers to the Discovery Museum in Acton, Massachusetts. It’s one of those places that every time we go, we find something new and exciting to play around with. The thing that caught my eye was a large poster of a quote by Albert Einstein: “Play is the highest form of research.”
This quote resonated with me, as a teacher and as a parent. I see it all the time in my own kids. The best way to learn about something is to play around with it.
I try to bring that aspect into my own classroom as well, but I teach middle schoolers, students that at times think that they’re too cool to play. In this post, I share four tips to encourage play with bigger kids.
1. Set the Tone Early
Encouraging play with students starts out as a routine. Yes, I know it sounds ironic. How can a teacher set up a routine around something as spontaneous as play? Creating a play routine means setting boundaries and expectations.
For example, when introducing students to a new app like Tinkercad or Scratch, I would show the students the basics of what the software can do. Then, I allow the students to navigate the environment, and I give them a basic challenge like build a house or make the sprite move on the screen. Leaving challenges open-ended allows me to sit back and see what the students come up with. At the end of class, students share out and teach everyone else about what they learned.
2. Scaffolding Play (Instructions vs. Free Build)
A challenge that I love to give students to help harness play is the “Same Stuff Challenge.” With this challenge, I give each student a collection of the same materials such as cups, pipe cleaners, and construction paper. Then, I tell the students to create! Make something, whatever speaks to you, and make it. I’ve had sea monsters, cars, rockets, houses, and people all made with the same materials. I always love doing this activity, because of all of the creative things students come up with.
Recently, when I did this challenge, something came up that I was not expecting. A student looked at me straight in the face and said “Mr. Murray I am not creative, I don’t like this. I can’t make anything.”
I was more shocked than anything else. How can a middle schooler not be creative and shut down like this?
I asked the student, “When you play with a Lego kit, do you like to follow instructions or go build something?” The student responded that he was the type that liked to follow the instructions. So, we broke down the challenge to make it seem like he was following instructions.
I asked him to take the materials and scatter them on the table and see if that stuff looked like anything (Kind of like an arts and crafts Rorschach test). The student said he thought he saw something that looked like a hand. So, we elaborated on it and made a checklist of what things go into making a hand. Sure enough, the student made a phenomenal hand out of the materials he had.
This whole interaction made me think a little bit more about how students work. Some students are fine to be set free on their own to explore creativity while other students find open-ended tasks like this difficult. They need a script or directions to follow to get them there. Having a plan in place for both types of learning can help everyone be creative and play in the end.
3. But, We’ve Done This Before…It's Boring!
I love a good egg drop activity, one of my first jobs in STEM education was running an egg drop program. There’s nothing better than the anticipation to see if an egg survived its dramatic plummet back to planet earth. Unfortunately, a lot of other STEM teachers also love the egg drop. Imagine my dismay when I’m all excited to do this program and I hear a chorus of whines “We did this last year in so and so’s classroom. This is BOOOORING! I already know how to do this.
Nothing can take the wind out of your sails faster than dis-interest. Especially when it's something you love doing. What do you do? Do you keep on going with bored students or do you try to change it up real quick?
What I ended up doing was asking the students, “What other ways could our egg meet its demise?” The students came up with a list of different egg-cellent fates such as being sat on, crushed with a brick, or thrown against a wall.
The challenge changed to students having 25 minutes to prepare their egg to meet any one of those fates. After 25 minutes, we rolled a die which selected the fate for that egg. Now they had 10 minutes to prepare for that situation.
Students who were whining at the beginning of the challenge were now off trying to come up with a solution to the new problem. The lesson here is to have a way to leave something left up to random chance so you never get the same project twice. Being unpredictable can keep students on their toes and helps reduce the whines.
Another creative activity that I love to do is something that I call STEM-Mad Libs. Use the sentence starter: Design a ___ for a ___ during a ___. Have students pick 6 words for each blank. Then roll a die to pick the word and the design! The sillier the idea the better.
4. Don’t Yuck My Yum
A mentor of mine used the statement, “don’t yuck my yum.” I thought it was a strange statement. One day I asked her to explain to me what it meant. She said, “Have you ever had something you loved doing? What did you enjoy? Did someone come up to you and tell you that it was stupid? How did that make you feel?”
She then went on to explain that students at this age are exploring interests. We should encourage that instead of shutting it down. The key to play and creativity is encouragement, no matter how silly the idea can be.
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Erik Murray is a 6th grade STEM Teacher in Massachusetts. Follow Erik on Twitter @MrSTEmurray.