Coyote Ridge students enjoy a Day of Play
The concept of the Global Day of Play is simple, and obvious to anybody who has read the name — on this day, students at schools across the world play.
The importance of the Global Day of Play is a bit more textured than a day spent solving puzzles instead of math problems though, said Coyote Ridge Elementary School Principal Deon Davis.
Coyote Ridge, an elementary school within the Thompson School District located in south Fort Collins, participated in the Day of Play for the first time on Wednesday. The concept was first proposed in 2015, and reached teachers and staff at Coyote Ridge a few years ago, but the COVID19 pandemic prevented it from being implemented until now.
According to Davis, teachers have been noticing worrying trends among students related to screen time and interpersonal interactions, made worse by the pandemic.
The Day of Play is intended to counter this by giving a full day of truly unstructured play to students. Teachers do not organize activities or arrange who plays with who, and the only limit placed on students is that technology is not allowed.
Unstructured play, said Stephanie Jepson, a kindergarten teacher whose classroom participated in the day of play on Wednesday, is as simple as it sounds, and gives plenty of positive benefits like imaginative thinking, as students have to come up with games and situations without any prompting.
“Since the pandemic we have noticed an increase in screen time,” Jepson said. “When kids are sharing about what they’re doing after school or on the weekends, it’s all about playing a
video game or getting to the next level. We just want to make sure this inspires a lot of play, and not just among kindergartners. Because we can’t imagine, if we’re having a lot of screen time, how it increases in other grade levels.”
Devices like iphones and ipads, while entertaining, don’t do much to develop good social skills, Davis said Wednesday.
“We have more kids that have more needs related to their inability to manage ambiguity, to relate to people, to move into a situation or, when they’re having a conflict, how do I manage that, how do I get out,” Davis said.
He added that part of the importance of the Day of Play is to communicate the importance of unstructured, unplugged, imaginative play with parents. As internet connected devices become more and more common, he said, it becomes easier to model behaviors for children that might not be healthy, like spending excess amounts of time online.
Cold weather kept students inside on Wednesday, but plenty of games
and toys like Legos, Lincoln Logs, puzzles and building blocks kept students busy.
Not every classroom participated in every way, Davis said. This being the first year the school has been involved, teachers were given leeway to decide how much and in what way the day would be celebrated. Some classrooms incorporated games into their regular curriculum, he said, while others encouraged students to bring non- electronic toys from home.
In a fifth- grade classroom, at the end of the day Wednesday, one group of students had recreated a Minecraft world out of Legos, and one student found an interesting way to incorporate a piece of the game into his work — he used transparent blocks to depict someone floating, something possible in the game.
“I would say it’s creative more than imaginative,” Davis said. “There’s a framework. Here’s all the things that are possible in Minecraft, and so now I’m going to recreate it in a different medium. That’s different than ‘ Anything is possible. I’m creating a world of my own.’”