Primary
This quarter, I have been working with Primary Demonstration Teachers Anna Terrazas, Cristina Paul, Nancy Villalta, Olivia Lozano, and CONNECT Research Project Scientist Dr. Christine Lee in implementing and understanding play-based learning. A few weeks ago, I observed Demonstration Teacher Anna Terrazas lead a play lesson on the Sonoran Desert. The primary students took a deep dive into the desert ecosystem and explored how living things, like cacti, owls, lizards, and coyotes, can survive in severe conditions. Through role-play, they investigated not only what it means to adapt in a specific environment, but how these adaptations look different across creatures.
Creatures in the Sonoran Desert
Recently, while observing a play lesson in Room 11, I watched as students excitedly transformed into plants, animals, and insects. Each student role-played as a desert creature, and moved in ways that showed their understanding of adaptations and the ecosystem. In one corner, I observed a group where students were hissing sharply and squirming slowly on their stomachs to mimic movements of a rattlesnake. In another corner, students were adopting the role of coyotes taking their day nap under shaded areas by crawling under desks. At the front of the room, a student stood in stiffness with his arms out acting as a prickly cactus.
Using chairs and the rug as props
This made me think about my own experiences learning about adaptations in elementary school because I learned these concepts in very static ways. At Lab School, learning isn’t just about listening to a teacher explain how animals and plants change and why they change. It was about going beyond pure memorization of varying survival tactics and actively putting themselves in the shoes of the respective creature they are adopting.
I saw evidence of this when the students were playing desert and I asked a student who was playing as a coyote why she was calmly curled up on the floor for a long time. She responded “sometimes, it can be too much to go look for food, so we sleep until we feel cooler to go hunt, and coyotes and owls have night vision because they are nocturnal so they can most likely see and hear better”. Since the student was playing as a coyote, she explained that the reason why she was curled on the floor was because nocturnal animals mostly sleep during the day. This showed me that the way students do role-play is scientific because meaningful movement made her gain a deeper connection to the process of adaptations.
As the desert sun came down, the kids burst with more excitement in their play. In the role of a lizard, one of the kids scurried as quickly as they could from one side of the rug to the other while keeping an eye out for danger. Ducking behind a chair, she peeked through to watch other members in her group. She whispered to me that being a lizard “is like being invisible… if I move too much the owl will see me and eat me!”. Full of thrill, it is apparent that she is not only playing as a lizard, she is a lizard, whose heart is racing at the thought of being seen by a predator. She is understanding the relationships predator and prey have in the desert by using more strategic movements in the presence of certain animals she comes across.
What I believed to be simple role-play in a primary class was actually much more than that. Play offers a powerful alternative to teaching methods that are deemed as more traditional in the classroom like sitting in chair rows. Play can encourage kids to model a different living thing outside of a human and understand what it means for them to adapt in an ecosystem. Play brings out an excitement to learn about plants and animals in our community and makes them more environmentally engaged students and I look forward to seeing how play is incorporated when learning about other topics!
Marygrace Gliane was born and raised in Long Beach, California. I am a 4th year undergraduate student at UCLA majoring in Education and Social Transformation. I am interested in education for sustainable development and eco-curriculum in early childhood education. I am also interested in creative content, brand managing/marketing, and policies that shape creative industries.
Questions about this blog post can be directed to Dr. Christine Lee (clee@labschool.ucla.edu).