Learning games is a set of 200 activities and beginning in the 1970s we tested out all of these activities individually to see if they would work, see if they would produce change in children, see if teachers liked them, see if children would respond to them, and those have been written up and teachers use these like a cafeteria of ideas that they choose for each child so that each child has a little plan and this particular week he\u2019s working on these two learning games and next week he\u2019s still on those two but he\u2019s added a third one and so forth and so forth. So that each teacher\u2019s planned individually for each child and you would see during the day many things that would be quite familiar. You\u2019d see circle time and you\u2019d see centers and so forth, but you would see the teacher kind of settling in with one child at a time or sometimes just two children at a time, usually no larger than that, and taking a short period of time with tiny babies that might be only thirty seconds or two minutes, in an older child it might be five minutes, and those little episodes become key moments in the day that have what I call powerful teaching, special learning habits during that time and it supplements all of the other free play and social interaction and so forth that happens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are three basic kinds of learning games. The first is the kind that you enter in progress play. You wait until you see something happening in the child\u2019s play, and then you say ah, that relates to a certain learning game I have in mind, and you join that play and you add some value to that child\u2019s play. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second kind is the kind where you have something in mind, but it\u2019s not likely to happen during the day, and so you invite the child into play, \u201ccome and play a game with me.\u201d And of course you always look for a time when the child is not super busy with something else, and so you\u2019re not interrupting something. And the third kind are games that are seamlessly incorporated into care giving. In fact, the person who wouldn\u2019t know much about learning games would hardly be able to notice most of these games. The teacher is doing certain things, but they\u2019ve done it so seamlessly within the day that it doesn\u2019t appear planful, but in fact it is on the teacher\u2019s part. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You might have a particular way that you are going to do a little copying of structure. Sometimes you use duplicate blocks. The teacher gets some blocks just like the child and you might just see a teacher sit down by a child and say \u201coh, I want to build a tower like yours,\u201d and you wouldn\u2019t even realize that that was a game that she had actually intended to do ahead of time when that opportunity came up. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Learning games is a set of 200 activities and beginning in the 1970s we tested out all of these activities individually to see if they would work, see if they would produce change in children, see if teachers liked them, see if children would respond to them, and those have been written up and teachers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2007","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2007"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2008,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2007\/revisions\/2008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}