Role of "Play" in Early Childhood Education

What does a toddler do all day? PLAY!

In early childhood learning, play is not the opposite of learning. It is often the mechanism through which learning happens.

This is a crucial point because how a society defines "play" shapes everything downstream: classroom design, teacher training, parenting advice, and even how a country writes its national curriculum.

What play actually means in early childhood education

Researchers rarely agree on a single tidy definition of play, but most descriptions share a handful of features.

✅Play is self-chosen and self-directed.

✅It is intrinsically motivated, meaning the child does it because the activity itself is satisfying, not because of a reward waiting at the end.

✅It involves active engagement rather than passive reception, and it usually carries some element of make-believe, rules, or exploration that the child controls.

Educational researchers often describe play along a spectrum.

At one end is free play, where a child chooses the activity, the materials, and the direction with almost no adult involvement.

At the other end we talk about guided or structured play, where an adult sets up the environment or introduces a goal, but the child still leads how the activity unfolds.

Between these two poles lies most of what actually happens in a good early years classroom or a well-designed worksheet: enough structure to build a specific skill, enough freedom that the child still feels ownership over what they are doing.

An activity or worksheet is not automatically "play" just because there is a toy involved or the worksheet has a cartoon character on it. What makes an activity playful is whether the child retains a sense of choice, curiosity, and enjoyment while doing it, not whether it looks colourful.

Why play-based learning matters

The case for play-based learning rests on three separate strands of evidence: developmental psychology, neuroscience, and large-scale educational outcomes.

I. From developmental psychology, two names come up constantly. Jean Piaget argued that children construct their understanding of the world through direct interaction with it, and that play is where a child tests, revises, and consolidates concepts about objects, cause and effect, and other people.

Lev Vygotsky went further, proposing that play creates what he called a "zone of proximal development": a space where a child can act slightly beyond their current ability level, supported by imagination, rules, or a more capable peer or adult. A child pretending to be a shopkeeper is, in Vygotsky's framing, practising arithmetic, negotiation, and social roles all at once, well before they could manage any of those tasks in isolation.

II. Neuroscience adds a second layer to this argument. Researchers studying play across species, including humans, have found that play activates and strengthens neural circuits linked to social bonding, emotional regulation, and problem-solving. Play appears to matter most during specific developmental windows, when the brain is unusually receptive to the kind of flexible, low-stakes practice that play provides.

This is part of why early years specialists are cautious about pushing formal academic instruction too early: a skill drilled through repetition without playful engagement may be learnt more slowly, and may not transfer as well to new situations, compared with the same skill built through play.

III. The third strand comes from large reviews of the educational evidence itself. A comprehensive 2017 review commissioned by the LEGO Foundation, drawing on decades of research across psychology and education, concluded that children learn most effectively when an activity is joyful, meaningful, actively engaging, and socially interactive, and that these qualities matter more than whether the activity is labelled "play" or "instruction."

In other words, the debate is less "play versus learning" and more "what conditions make any activity effective for learning," and play consistently creates several of those conditions at once.

Play-Based Teaching Techniques across the world

Different countries and pedagogical movements have translated this evidence into strikingly different classroom practices for using play in early childhood education.

Reggio Emilia, developed in northern Italy after the Second World War, treats the child as a capable, curious individual who should co-construct knowledge alongside teachers rather than receive it from them. Classrooms are designed as a "third teacher," full of natural materials, mirrors, and open-ended resources that invite a child to explore a question over days or weeks, often documented through photographs, drawings, and children's own words.

Montessori education, founded by Maria Montessori in Italy in the early twentieth century, takes a more structured approach to materials while still centring the child's independence. Specially designed equipment, such as graduated cylinders or sandpaper letters, allows a child to work through a sequence at their own pace, correcting their own mistakes through the design of the material itself rather than through adult feedback.

Forest schools, which originated in Scandinavia in the 1950s and have since spread to the UK, Canada, and elsewhere, move the entire learning environment outdoors. Children spend regular, extended sessions in woodland or natural settings, engaging in unstructured physical play, den-building, and exploration.

A systematic review published in Educational Psychology Review in 2023 examined sixteen studies on forest school attendance among children aged three to six, and found consistent benefits in motor development, creative thinking, and psychological resilience, alongside more mixed results on narrowly defined cognitive tasks. The review's authors were careful to note that the overall quality of the underlying studies was often weak, so the findings should be read as promising rather than settled.

New Zealand's Te Whāriki curriculum, first introduced in 1996, takes a different route again, weaving together four broad principles (empowerment, holistic development, family and community, and relationships) into a framework rather than a fixed set of lessons, deliberately leaving room for local culture, including Māori concepts of learning, to shape how play unfolds in each setting.

What these approaches share, despite their differences, is a refusal to treat early years education as scaled-down primary school. Each one assumes that a young child learns differently from an older one, and each one uses play, in some structured or unstructured form, as the main vehicle for that learning.

How play-based learning applies in India

India's early years landscape has moved through a significant shift in the last five years. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 restructured Indian schooling into a new 5+3+3+4 model, creating a unified "Foundational Stage" that covers children aged three to eight and formally brings Anganwadi centres, pre-primary schools, and the first two years of primary school under one pedagogical umbrella. The policy explicitly commits to play-based and activity-based learning for this stage, partly in response to evidence that a very large share of brain development occurs before the age of six.

The National Curriculum Framework for the Foundational Stage, released by the NCERT in 2022, translates this policy commitment into more concrete guidance: flexible, multi-level classrooms, locally adapted play kits, and a shift away from rote memorisation in the earliest years. Several states have built their own materials on top of this framework. Odisha, for example, adapted an NCERT-developed play kit into a programme called "Jadu Pedi" using low-cost, locally available materials, while Madhya Pradesh runs a monthly initiative that shows parents simple play-based activities they can run at home.

The gap between policy and practice, however, remains wide. Recent academic reviews of NEP 2020's early years reforms point to uneven teacher training, limited effective learning time in many Anganwadi centres, and continuing pressure from parents and some schools to move towards formal literacy and numeracy work earlier than the policy recommends. For a country where many parents grew up with rote-based schooling themselves, play-based learning can look, at first glance, like it is "less serious" than a worksheet full of repeated letters, even when the research points the other way.

Play in the modern world: what has changed

Several pressures are reshaping how play happens in practice, regardless of what any curriculum document says.

Screen time is the most visible change. Digital devices offer an easy, low-effort form of engagement that competes directly with the slower, sometimes messier work of open-ended play, and many parents report defaulting to a screen simply because it buys a predictable, quiet interval.

Urbanisation has reduced the physical space available for the kind of outdoor, risk-taking play that forest school research associates with motor and emotional benefits. Fewer children have easy, safe access to a garden, a street, or open ground near home, particularly in dense Indian cities.

Parenting culture has also shifted towards heightened risk aversion. Climbing, rough-and-tumble play, and unsupervised exploration, once ordinary parts of a childhood, are now more likely to be actively discouraged, even though a reasonable amount of physical risk-taking appears to support confidence and self-regulation.

Finally, the commercial market for children's products has grown considerably, and "educational" branding is not the same thing as educational value. A product covered in phonics or STEM branding can still be a passive, low-engagement activity if it removes the child's sense of choice and exploration.

Looking forward: what to do, and what to avoid

For parents, educators, and anyone designing learning materials, a few practical principles hold up well against the evidence.

Do treat play as a legitimate form of learning, not a reward for finishing "real" work. Do choose materials and activities that leave room for a child's own decisions, even within a structured worksheet or curriculum. Do favour longer, unhurried stretches of play over short, tightly scheduled bursts, since much of the benefit documented in the research comes from sustained engagement rather than brief exposure. Do involve real objects, outdoor space, and unstructured time alongside any printed or digital resource.

Avoid assuming that "play-based" means unstructured or directionless; the strongest programmes worldwide combine a clear developmental goal with genuine child choice in how that goal gets met. Avoid pushing formal literacy and numeracy drills earlier than a child's developmental stage supports, simply because it looks more rigorous on paper. Avoid conflating screen-based "edutainment" with the developmental benefits associated with physical, social, and imaginative play. Avoid assuming a single international model, whether Reggio Emilia, Montessori, or forest school, transfers wholesale into a different cultural and linguistic context without adaptation.

Play-based learning is not a passing trend in early years education; it reflects a genuine, cross-disciplinary body of evidence built over decades. The details of implementation will always look different depending on where a family lives, what languages a household speaks, and what resources a school or a home can access. What stays consistent is the underlying principle: young children learn best when they are curious, engaged, and, quite literally, playing.

If you want to explore play-based learning for your child, start here:

www.playfulhomeducation.com

How to Plan Home Learning Activities for Preschool Kids

How do I plan activities for my child? How do I know which activities to do? In this article, I am answering these two questions.

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References

1. Fjørtoft, I. (2001). The natural environment as a playground for children: The impact of outdoor play activities in pre-primary school children. Early Childhood Education Journal, 29(2), 111–117. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1012576913074

2. Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood. W. W. Norton & Company.

3. Pellis, S., & Pellis, V. (2009). The playful brain: Venturing to the limits of neuroscience. Oneworld Publications.

4. Sella, E., Bolognesi, M., Bergamini, E., Mason, L., & Pazzaglia, F. (2023). Psychological benefits of attending forest school for preschool children: A systematic review. Educational Psychology Review, 35(1), Article 29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09750-4

5. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

6. Zosh, J. M., Hopkins, E. J., Jensen, H., Liu, C., Neale, D., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Solis, S. L., & Whitebread, D. (2017). Learning through play: A review of the evidence. LEGO Foundation.

7. Bhoi, C., & Patra, B. (2023). Early learning redefined: Analysing the pedagogical shifts in pre-primary education in NEP 2020. Journal of Education Method and Learning Strategy, 10–15.

8. National Council of Educational Research and Training. (2022). National curriculum framework for the foundational stage 2022. NCERT. https://ncert.nic.in/pdf/NCF_for_Foundational_Stage_20_October_2022.pdf