In PHQP 0008, Play Is Sparked By The Child Not The Toy, Jeff explains that children’s minds, not toys, ignite play; experiences and knowledge drive creativity and self-directed learning. Jeff also unpacks actor-observer bias in the classroom, outlines five key developmental domains, and delivers a classic Dad Joke of the Week. Bonus: bagpipe tunes and STEM-friendly spring scales get a shoutout!

Episode Video

Watch Now: PHQP_0008 Play Is Sparked By The Child Not The Toy

Episode Notes

• Play Is In The Child Not The Toy
• 3 Reasons ‘Educational’ Toys Are an Epic Fail in Playful Environments
• The nursery that took all the children’s toys away
• Too many toys are bad for children, study suggests
• Actor-Observer Bias
• 5 Key Developmental Domains
• Developmental Domains
• Goddesses Of Bagpipes, Don’t Stop Believing Bagpipes

The Play Is Sparked By The Child Not The Toy Transcript

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

So, I’m going to start with a little bit of a bagpipe update. I mentioned in an earlier episode that I was going through a bagpipe music spree, rabbit hole, and somebody reached out to find out if one that was true. Yes, yes it was.

I’m past that now. I’ve moved on to other things. And what my favorite bagpipe music was.

And I think if you go to Spotify, I mean, or where else on the web, you can go to find the goddesses of bagpipes. It’s these three young ladies that play bagpipe. And I think if you’re looking for a song, try Don’t Stop Believing.

The bagpipe version of Don’t Stop Believing is pretty darn enjoyable. So, check that out. Also, if you’ve got a favorite bagpipe tune, let me know about it.

Let’s get into this topic one, part eight of our core value series. We’re going to be getting out of this. I think there’s 10 or 12 total that I’ve got put together.

Part eight, we’re going to be talking about the idea that play is sparked by the child, not the toy. Just because you’ve got a piece of plastic broccoli does not mean you’re going to be interested in playing with plastic broccoli. The interest in what we want to play, what kids want to engage in their play, begins in their minds.

It’s based on what they’ve experienced, what they’ve seen, what they’ve thought about, what they’ve imagined, what they enjoy, what they’re scared of. But all play begins up here between our ears. And this is why the first condition of play is that play is selected by the players.

Because if you are forced into an activity that isn’t on your mind, that you’re not interested in, that doesn’t have value to you, that doesn’t start here, you’re not going to be really engaged fully in it. And therefore, it’s not going to meet the full definition of play. So play starts in our minds.

Toys are tools for advancing that play. So back to play begins in the mind. If you have a child who is interested in, oh, say, superheroes, because they watch a lot of superhero movies and they play superhero video games and they have superhero books and superheroes are always on their mind, they’re going to show up at your program and want to be superheroes.

If you have a child that is really into puppies, puppies are probably going to show up in their play. And we need to figure out a way to support that as adults, as caregivers and parents. Toys are the tools for telling those stories.

We’ve talked earlier in an earlier episode, we got into the definition of loose parts. This is why loose parts are so valuable because they are flexible and can take on lots of different roles based on what the kids are interested in. This is why, I mean, the empty cardboard box is an ideal toy that should be available in multiple sizes and shapes in early learning programs because they offer so much.

One day that cardboard box might be a time machine, the next day it might be an x-ray machine, the next day it might be a cave where a bear lives, and on and on and on. A lot of the adult planned toys, they’re not as valuable for supporting all of children’s play because they come with a built-in story to them. We’ll talk about that in future episodes, but imagine a Batman figurine.

If you’re not into playing Batman, that Batman figurine isn’t very valuable for you. It’s very hard for a child to turn a Batman figurine into another character because that character is so ingrained with their backstory. We like to think about toys as tools for supporting the play, not as the spark for the play.

The power is in the player. It’s not in the toy. The player is the one that’s making all these decisions.

This is why we’ve got to create environments where children are able to do that choosing and support the kinds of play that they decide to bring to our environments. That can be hard because sometimes the types of play that they want to bring to your environment, you might not want to or feel you should support. Rough and tumble play, running, climbing, a lot of these things.

A lot of the things we talked about last week when we were talking about the sensory systems, I believe, are sparked by the interest in superheroes and those kinds of things. Weapons play. If children are watching TV shows and movies and playing video games or experiencing in real life weapons, weapons are going to show up in their play.

We need to figure out a way to support that play. Knowledge and experience fuel play, not the objects. If you’re looking for a takeaway from this, there’s a one-sentence takeaway.

Knowledge and experiences fuel play, not objects. It starts up here. Also, even knowledge and experiences you dislike, we’ve got to remember that.

If we’re not into weapons play or superhero play or death play or loud play or play that involves a lot of big body activity, we’ve got to figure out a way to support those environments anyway if we truly want to meet kids where they are and allow them to create real play for themselves. The takeaway question is, how can you better support the play that the children create in your environments?

If we can continually ask ourselves that question and reassess our environment and tweak our environment based on those answers, we create environments where children are able to engage in large, long blocks of time where they engage in self-directed, uninterrupted play and exploration. That’s what the goal should be for early learning programs.

Topic two, actor-observer bias. This is an article I put together in the early learning glossary I’m building over at playvolutionhq.com. There’s a couple hundred entries there now. This is kind of an interesting thing.

Here’s the article if you’re watching the video. Hey, if you’re listening to the audio version, great. I appreciate it.

If you want to check out the video when I talk about things like these, in the show notes, there is always a link to the video version. Even if you’re getting the audio version on your podcast app of choice, you can always access the video versions there. You can subscribe to the video versions at playvolutionhq.com. Actor-observer bias is the tendency for people to attribute their behavior to external factors while explaining others’ behavior as a result of internal traits or choices.

This bias can affect how we perceive and judge actions. The bias can also shape our expectations and responses to behavior in the classroom dynamics. For example, if I’m late someplace, it’s because traffic was bad and I couldn’t find my keys.

If somebody else is late, it’s because they are lazy and they’re never on time and they don’t know how to get themselves places. And there’s a big difference there. We always give ourselves the benefit of doubt, and we don’t always do that with other people.

Later on, we’ve got actor-observer bias occurs when individuals evaluate their own actions differently from how they evaluate others’ actions. When we are the actor, we justify our behavior based on situational factors. I was late because traffic was bad.

But when we are the observer, we blame the individual. She was late because she’s irresponsible. Now, this bias is a natural part of human perception.

It’s wired into us. And there are some good reasons for it, because we have direct access to our own experiences but must infer the reasons other people are behaving and acting the way they are. So we’re wired to kind of make those guesses, but those guesses can often get in the way.

And so with kids, if we’ve got a distracted learner, so maybe a child, we have a child who seems disengaged during outdoor storytime, maybe seen as not paying attention, when in reality, that child might be processing the story in their own way, struggling with sensory input, like an itchy shirt, or thinking about the butterfly that just fluttered by. And so often our biases, what we observe with children, we filter it through this lens that gives us this maybe not correct vision of them. And over time, once adult judgments kind of have reoccurred a couple of times, our actor-observer bias can reinforce those perceptions.

So a child that we kind of perceive as being a troublemaker or irresponsible or rowdy kind of gets labeled that way. And then we have that bias towards them in other situations. And that can really, really affect the relationship and our engagement with them.

I’m going to skip that, give you something to read if you go check out the article. Mitigating actor-observer bias in early learning. So we can do some things about it.

One thing we can do is we can pause before reacting. Another thing we can do is encourage perspective-taking. Modeling and teaching children to consider others’ perspectives, and doing that ourselves, is a way to get out of the habit of actor-observer bias.

We can reflect on our own biases. We can use open-ended questions and try to suss out what’s actually going on and get a clearer view of things. And we can offer second chances.

When we start labeling, when we become aware that we started labeling something with this bias, we can kind of pull back and decide we’re not going to do that anymore and realize that that child is still a work in progress. The article’s there at playevolutionhq.com, link in the show notes if you are inclined to go check it out. So that’s actor-observer bias.

What we got up next, topic three, I wanted to touch a little bit on five key developmental domains. And so a developmental domain, and we’re getting this in here early because this is going to come back, we might end up doing a whole episode on each of these. But a developmental domain, just think of them as file drawers or silos.

Because adults, we like to break up and categorize in short things. And we’ve done that kind of with learning. And so we kind of break learning down into these little subcomponents so it’s more orderly for us.

Now children don’t just learn in one of these domains at a time. Children can be learning things in multiple domains at any one time. But for our understanding, we like to break it down.

And if you start looking for developmental domains online, you’ll come up with most, there’s a lot of versions out there, most have four to eight categories. I’ve put this one together, this is kind of a hybrid I put together that kind of works for me. And this is pretty much the way I’m reorganizing things on the Playvolution HQ site.

And so there’s a PDF handout that I put together, there’ll be a link in the show notes. And so the key developmental domains I put together are one, social-emotional. And I think we can all understand that that’s one category of learning kids engage in.

This is a focus on emotional well-being and the ability to form and maintain relationships. Communicative development. Other domain schema will call this something like language and literacy maybe for example.

So communicative involves the development of language and communication skills. Not only written skills and spoken language, but also body language fits in there. Hand gestures, facial expressions, those kind of things.

Those are all key components the way we communicate. And so that gets stuck in its own little file drawer cabinet. Physical domain encompasses the growth and coordination and sensory integration of a child’s body.

And so this is a big one, this is what we talked about with the sensory systems, this is what we talked about in the episode where we dug into the fact that we humans learn by moving. The physical domain is very, very important in the early years because it’s wiring those sensory systems and preparing the body for everything it’s going to do for the next 70 or 80 or 90 years. And so we need large muscle activity, we need small muscle activity, and we need lots of sensory activity in the early years.

And the adaptive domain focuses on acquiring essential self-care skills and learning to navigate the world. And so adaptive, this is one that gets left out of a lot of the domains. The other four here are pretty common.

Adaptive kind of gets set to the side sometimes or integrated into the others, but I think it deserves its own category because this is really, really important. Think about the adaptive domain as the stuff you need to know to get along in the world. Those skills and information for navigating and caring for yourself in the world.

And finally, the cognitive domain involves mental processes related to learning, problem solving, and understanding. I’ve purposely put this last on the list because in a lot of early learning settings, we rush so fast in the cognitive stuff and we forget or gloss over the importance of the physical or the adaptive. But they’re all important.

And again, children can be learning in multiple or maybe all of these domains at any one time when they’re sitting. Just a simple activity like sitting and playing with the Play-Doh with a couple of peers is an opportunity because they’ve got maybe a small muscle development going on. If they got a lot of Play-Doh, maybe it’s large muscle.

But there’s conversation going on, undoubtedly. They’re asking for the rolling pin and they’re talking about the colors that they’re getting when they’re mixing colors together. They’re maybe arguing and bickering about one of the cookie cutters they want to use.

And they’re talking about going to grandma’s after the preschool day is over. So there’s all that conversation. There’s always social emotional stuff going on when you’ve got groups of children engaging together.

They’re learning to self-regulate. They’re learning to take turns. They’re learning to survive having their feelings hurt when they don’t get the cookie cutter that they want right away.

All of these things kind of fit into the adaptive domain. And then there’s the cognitive stuff when they’re making the little balls with the Play-Doh or rolling out the big long snakes and figuring out that this color and this color make that color. That’s all kind of the cognitive stuff going on.

And it’s just there with play. And so when we’re creating real child-led play environments, what we should really be thinking about is not setting up lessons that focus on each of these domains, but getting better at seeing these domains in the activities the children are choosing. So we trust them to choose their play because it starts in here for them.

And then when we’re trying to map out, to document their learning, we look for learning in these different domains in the play that we’re seeing. Whether it’s Play-Doh play or superhero play or rough-and-tumble play or sitting and reading books or whatever it is, we can find these developmental domain activities if we look for them. And so becoming better observers is part of that process, if that makes sense.

And again, the link to this handout is in the show notes. So time to wrap things up. I guess the big takeaway for the episode is pay attention to that spark.

What is sparking play in the children in your program? Because if we can figure out what’s sparking them, the dinosaur kid, the superhero kid, then we can create, we can tailor the environment to meet the needs of the play they’re interested in and then step back and kind of observe the learning that’s happening in those different domains. So look for these sparks. The Amazon ID I want to go to this week, somebody purchased a set of these, a set of spring scales, 10 transparent spring scales.

And so these are great for having around outside and inside to just give kids an opportunity to weigh things. It’s a chance for some STEM play. It’s a chance to bump into numbers and the concept of weight and other things.

And so those are a good thing. If you want to support the show, check out that Amazon link in the show notes. What else we got going on here? Again, share it if you like it.

The Playvolution HQ site is there for the sharing, as is this podcast. I’m not on the social media. So the way things get shared is people find stuff and like it and share it with somebody else who might like it.

I greatly appreciate people who go out and share things that they feel are share worthy. So thank you for that. Next week, we’re going to get into caregiver self-care because all the stuff we’ve talked about is a lot easier if you, the caregiver, whether you’re a parent, professional, is taking better care of yourself.

Dad joke of the week, we’re running behind. Why was the calendar afraid? It’s days were numbered. This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast.

Thanks for listening. Back soon. See, I said we’re going to keep these episodes under 20 minutes.

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