Seth, a student with autism, was grouping ABC blocks together, and Ben, who has Phelan McDermid Syndrome (a syndrome that affects cognitive and motor skills), was playing with the marble tower. Isaiah, who has social-behavioral concerns, and Mateus, a typically developing peer, were playing with the train set. Kario, who has Downs Syndrome, was at a magnetic board putting magnetic pictures, letters, and numbers on it.
Taylor, who has a craniofacial anomaly resulting in a vision problem, cognitive problems, and seizures, was in the greeting-time area pretending to “read” a big book to her imaginary class. During a recent work time, I glanced around our room to see just what was happening as the children played. ’ve been mulling these questions over in my mind for several weeks now. With all that work and the mountains of paperwork we teachers face, is it possible that sometimes we might forget just how important play is? Do we really have time to get on the floor and play with cars? Can we take time to paint our own hands? Do we support play as part of our jobs? Can we explain what children are learning as they play? Perhaps we can also ask ourselves if we can play with purpose, or “intention,” because as Piaget (1962) argued, in order to think things through, children need to play things through. As educators of young children, we know it is not “just play” and that our jobs are a lot of work, in the same way that we know a child's play is also a child's work.
As a speech and language pathologist in preschools for children with special needs, I sometimes joke that I have the best job in the world because I get paid to play with children.
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