15% OFF! ✅ plus Your Sneak Peak 👀 on the 'Power of Play-Based Learning' in My New Book
December 31, 2022
Happy New Years’ Eve! Are you glad to say goodbye to 2022? What are you looking forward to in 2023 and beyond?
What will be your priorities in the New Year? 💫
I’m closing out this year with several shifts in perspective I’m striving to hold for the next year in 2023. I’ve walked through gauntlet of adversities and unexpected changes in my life over the last 12 months and I’m sure you may have as well. For privacy and safety concerns, I’m going to include all the extended juicy details under the paywall below. Make sure you are signed up as a paid subscriber to receive all the best content, extended personal stories and my continued book previews I will be releasing in the new year.
This week, I’ll be summing up my 2022 and giving you a glimpse at a great section focusing on Play-based learning in my upcoming book focusing on Children’s Mental Health and holistic wellbeing. Let me know what you think! 👇👇👇
Right now I’m running a NEW YEARS SPECIAL for 15 % OFF annual plans when you subscribe by January 7th! That means that the regular $60 price is now available for just $51 to stay as a paid subscriber for 12 months and receive all the best insights and exclusive content made available to paid subscribers.
Of course, there are many other items of everyday life that would be just superfluous for me to include here. I’m sure you’re staying busy too.
For one example, I’m leading a faith-based health class at my local church starting in February, which will likely lead me to put the material in a book, online course, or other functional format down the road.
If you have any hot takes or interesting perspectives on the integration of faith and health, let me know in the comments below. I’ll also be sharing some of that content here as well, under the direction of the Grounded section of the Newsletter coming soon.
Now, for today’s story on the Power of Play-based Learning for Little Kids!
Play based learning is what we need. Play based learning is one of the most effective learning strategies we have available to us, but we far too often neglect its capabilities as we feel overly pressured to educate to appease test scores and rigorous academic requirements with a never-ending pressure to succumb to the system of stressful worry about our children’s futures.
“Play based learning builds the brain’s architecture.”
- Jesse Ilhardt, Leader in Early Education
In particular, layering the multiple effective benefits of play-based as compared to say a stereotypical cold, static, monotone college lecture experience, play-based learning profoundly outperforms.
Play-based learning offers the brain much more to hold on to as part of the learning experience.
Especially important for children with ADHD and any neurological consideration is the fully functional prefrontal cortex of the brain, the center for planning, preparing, goal orientation, and much more.
Play-based learning helps feed this commonly underfed frontal lobe and helps fire neurons where they are needed most.
These areas of executive functioning are inherent to the function of natural play - anticipating your opponent’s running path, planning a route of escape, using strategy and timing, knowing when to speak and when to patiently wait your turn.
Children Need to Play
Likely much much more than the amount of time we allow for, children need to play and play proficiently. Ample and abundant play time is an honest requirement for a child’s sufficient development.
Rather than being overly focused on technical skills and worrying about our child’s interest of abilities in math, science, technology, perhaps we would be better off to take a step back and ensure they are granted the healthy soil of ample play in which a beautiful garden of education can learn to thrive and flourish - whether that be from the arts, from reading, rhetoric, arithmetic, chemistry, physics, athletic performance, or whatever technological future they may have at their fingertips.
We often place such heavy and pressuring expectations on their daily lives in hopes they will at some point in the future - someday - be enough and we can sign the dotted line that we did our part to raise them right and send them on their way.
But our role is often muddled with our own messy personal perspectives of our own lives, past pains, hurts, habits, hang ups and struggles.
We want our children’s lives to be different. We want them to have it better than we ever did. We want them to live life to the fullest and typically, we are motivated to reduce unnecessary risks for their own potential life adversities. While this may not be good, bad, or even worth our time to give a grade, it is a common truth, nonetheless.
We want our children to never suffer the hardships we faced ourselves and we want to pass on the best of our own best experiences growing up down to them to give them the chance at forming similar positive bonded memories we hold in our own minds.
But we must recognize the truth that we cannot craft our children like Pinocchio. We cannot prevent bad things from happening or lead them to make “all the right choices” in life either.
So, with all these wonderful things to say about play-based learning, why isn’t it simply standard practice today in all schools K-12?
Well, for one… Adults are TERRIBLE at giving themselves a chance to play and open their minds to creative learning in a play-based way. Traveling to a new city, going to grab coffee or dinner with a friend or going on a hike or group camping trip are about the closest we ever get to play.
As adults, we are awful about giving ourselves a chance to play. We are so uncomfortable inside our own skin that we run away from spending alone time with ourselves or embrace the unexpected, giving ourselves a chance to experience something new, fresh, innovative, and creative.
In America alone, we are one of the worst culprits when it comes to overworking, overthinking, overstressing our lives and not giving enough time for creative expression, holiday, or paid-time-off.
With such little play, as obvious building blocks for health, happiness, granting us with a stress release, increasing our resilience to stress, and a way to process our stress and emotional hardships, worries, anxieties as responsible adults, it is no wonder we are so lonely, anxious, afraid, fearful, and depressed in this country with increasing mental illness, drug use, and substance abuse on the rise as well. Perhaps play is much more important than what we ever expected.
Let’s start with this. in the world of public education and teaching, the inescapable demands for meeting expectations of academic standards, long lists of learning objectives, many teachers find themselves stuck in the middle of children who need more help while the class must push forward to catch up with the demands for end of the semester standards.
Academic achievements have been positioned with stressful expectations that leave many teachers and educators feeling helpless and thus, many have felt forced to leave the system they either no longer believed in anymore or couldn’t function within themselves….
[more on this story and my personal summary of 2022 below]
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to ZigZag Nutrition to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.