How Educators Can Embed Guided Play to Meet Curricular Goals
By Robyn Ridgley, Katherine A. Mangione, and Martin Ridgley
The first graders in Mr. Ridgley’s class are working on adding sums up to 20. During math time, he invites three children to gather around a gameboard and introduces two, 10-sided dice that look like jewels. “The purpose of our game today is to roll the dice and find the sum of the two numbers,” he says. “You’ll find the number representing your sum on the gameboard and place your chip on the numeral. When you have three chips in a row, you’ll have completed the round.”
Mr. Ridgley’s plan is to support children’s addition fluency and note the strategies they use, which meet his state’s math standard of using “mental strategies flexibly and efficiently to develop fluency in addition and subtraction within 20” (Tennessee State Board of Education 2021, 3).
One of the children, Angelo, races over to the board. Last year, Angelo struggled with math and was often overwhelmed by the worksheets he had to complete. Now, though, he happily plays with the other children as they take turns rolling the dice and adding to 20.
Angelo rolls a 5 and a 4. “Five,” he says, placing his finger on the 5 die. He then uses a counting-on strategy to arrive at the sum. “6, 7, 8, 9. The answer is 9!”
“You also know the double strategy,” Mr. Ridgley reminds him.
“Oh yeah,” Angelo says. “I know 4 plus 4 is 8, and one more makes 9. I learned that in kindergarten.” Mr. Ridgley then asks, “Could 5 plus 5 help you solve 5 plus 4?”
Research continues to show that play and academic instruction should work together (NASEM 2024; Guernsey 2026). Educators across the early childhood age band are tasked with promoting children’s development and learning by providing playful experiences, materials, and interactions. In the primary grades, this includes hands-on, play-based learning opportunities that extend the ideas and concepts introduced during teacher-directed instruction (Masterson 2022).
Play allows children to practice new skills as educators observe and gently scaffold their learning (NAEYC 2020; Skene et al. 2022). This is particularly true when the play is guided: Educators prepare playful learning environments with specific instructional goals or learning objectives in mind. They then give children the agency to engage in and guide their play, providing open-ended questions and prompts as needed (Toub et al. 2016; Weisberg et al. 2016; Pyle et al. 2017; Zosh et al. 2022).
Guided play is developmentally appropriate for all children, birth to age 8 (NAEYC 2020). Yet elementary schools offer limited time for play of any kind. Learning activities in grades 1–3 tend to include mostly whole group and teacher-directed instruction, with little time allocated for child-directed centers (Justice et al. 2022; Christopher & Nesbitt 2023). Recess—a key time for play—has been limited in some schools to just 20 to 30 minutes daily (Thompson & London 2023; Tsai et al. 2024). And many states and school districts have adopted prescribed curricula that may seem to limit educators’ agency in planning lessons, including their use of playful experiences to foster learning across content areas (Narayanan et al. 2024).
We (the authors) are educators who have worked in early childhood and primary settings for 30 years as classroom teachers, mentor teachers, and faculty to preservice educators. We work in a state (Tennessee) that has adopted standards-aligned materials, and we understand the challenges of providing meaningful opportunities for primary-grade children to engage in play and playful learning. Like in the opening vignette, we have seen how educators can strategically plan and introduce guided play activities that adhere to curricular guidelines while responding to each child’s learning needs (Zosh et al. 2022). In this article, we show how Mr. Ridgley (the third author) incorporated guided play into his first-grade curriculum. We also offer ways that other primary-grade teachers can identify strategies for supporting guided play in their settings.
The Use of Instructional Materials
Educators, leaders, families, and policymakers continue to be concerned about children’s literacy and math performance on state and national tests. This has led to state- and district-level changes in expectations and resources around early childhood curricula (CCSSO, n.d.; SCORE 2024). Increasingly, policymakers, schools, and educators are relying on instructional materials and related professional learning supports to determine what children should be learning and how educators should teach it (Doan et al. 2022; SCORE 2024; TNTP 2024).
Tennessee is one of 13 states that make up the High-Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development Network. This group was formed in 2018 and is supported by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO, n.d.). The goal is to encourage the use of standards-aligned curricular materials that meet states’ specific criteria for quality, which can vary depending on a state’s priorities or major areas of focus (Doan et al. 2022). In our state, materials are intended to “support diverse learners, promote deep understanding, and align with educational standards” (TDOE 2025, introductory page).
What this means in practice is that public school leaders and teachers must learn about the curricular materials created or selected by their state, including the scope, sequence, and pace they need to follow (NIET 2020; Doan et al. 2022; TNTP 2024). Tennessee’s Department of Education, for example, created a guidance document about how educators can analyze materials for connections between tasks and routines as well as misconceptions or hurdles children may experience as they go through lessons and units (TDOE, n.d.). For some content areas, educators must become familiar with a script or words provided to guide children in their learning (TNTP 2024; Shields & Narayanan 2026).
Because this is often counter to how educators are used to planning and teaching, it is important to consider the professional development, coaching, and involvement from leadership to help educators navigate these changes and to ensure that they have the agency to respond to individual children’s strengths, needs, and contexts (NIET 2020; TNTP 2024; CCSSO 2025; Pixley 2026). In our state, the Department of Education and public school districts provide support to facilitate implementation. This includes professional development and teaching teams working together to review and prepare lessons (SCORE 2024; TDOE 2024; TNTP 2024).
For example, Mr. Ridgley received training from his school district on how to use adopted instructional materials for literacy and math instruction. These materials included (Cahill 2026)
Unit and lesson plans
Student practice materials
Daily, unit, and module assessments
Extension activities
Ideas for individualized supports for multilingual learners and children with disabilities
Family and community connections
Instructional coaches and principals checked in during planning meetings, classroom drop-ins, and formal observations to make sure the teaching teams in Mr. Ridgley’s school were preparing lessons from the curriculum and using it daily. This relates to fidelity, or how well educators implement a curriculum in the way intended by its developers. Research has shown that higher curriculum fidelity scores are associated with greater child gains (Hamre et al. 2010; NASEM 2024).
Embedding Guided Play into the Curriculum
Educators must have the agency to enhance a curriculum so that it is responsive to children’s abilities, interests, and contexts (NAEYC 2020; NASEM 2024; Shields & Narayanan 2026; also see the Summer 2026 issue of Young Children, which focuses on Toward Intentional Teaching: The Need for Educator Agency). This includes embedding guided play into the daily rhythm of the classroom and within planned learning activities. Research has shown that guided play can provide a meaningful context for children to learn grade-level content while being given opportunities for developmentally appropriate interactions (Hassinger-Das et al. 2019; Zosh et al. 2022). For example, evidence suggests that guided play can be a more effective approach than direct instruction or free play for developing certain early math skills, including learning spatial vocabulary (Skene et al. 2022). Others have found that when combined with shared book reading, guided play can scaffold young children’s vocabulary learning (Toub et al. 2018).
To effectively identify when and how guided play is embedded in the curriculum, educators must carefully consider instructional goals and materials as well as what they know about individual learners. This helps to ensure that all children benefit from the curriculum while participating in engaging, motivating, and developmentally appropriate experiences (Masterson & Bohart 2019).
During a professional development day, Mr. Ridgley and the first-grade teaching team worked with an instructional coach to study the district’s new materials. They discovered several entry points for engaging children in play. These were either embedded within the required components or listed as extension activities that could be offered if time allowed. As a team, they decided to identify and implement guided play activities for any curricular components that did not include them (see “Identifying Areas for Guided Play” below).
In the following sections, we show how Mr. Ridgley threaded guided play throughout his first-grade curriculum, scaffolding playful explorations and activities toward specific learning goals. We also offer examples of how he assessed children’s learning.
Identifying Areas for Guided Play
When looking to intentionally incorporate guided play into existing curricula, educators should analyze unit and lesson plans. Can activities be modified to be more playful and connected to children’s experiences and contexts? Can they be altered to give children more agency? The following bullet points describe the guided play opportunities identified by Mr. Ridgley’s teaching team.
Transitions and other routines may include songs, chants, and movement activities to support specific skills, such as vocabulary development or phonological awareness. For example, the curriculum used by Mr. Ridgley included Bird Simon Says, where children can act out verbs (hop, snatch, peck, leap) connected to the movements of birds. Sound Shuffle asks children to repeat a word, then change the first letter to make a new word (“Say sap. Now change the /s/ to /t/.”) Educators can ask children which of these activities they would like to engage in when moving from one task to the next.
The curriculum may include poems and other short texts that are useful for building vocabulary, teaching high-frequency words, or practicing letter-sound correspondence. Educators can ask children to act out these texts, assessing specific literacy and language skills as they play (Foorman et al. 2016; Ripstein 2019). After reading a poem multiple times, for example, Mr. Ridgley asked children to identify movements that would correspond to the poem’s language. The class added these movements each time the poem was read.
If the curriculum suggests that children demonstrate their learning through drawing or writing, educators can set up workstations or centers where children can use various art and writing materials to illustrate the content included in literacy or math lessons. Mr. Ridgley provided feathers, photos of birds, and other materials in the writing center to support children’s creation of written works about the birds they were studying. He assessed their learning through observation.
A curriculum may include games that address specific skills. Games are an effective way for primary-grade children to practice targeted skills (Toub et al. 2016; Vogt et al. 2018; Masterson 2022; Zosh et al. 2022). As shared in the opening vignette, Mr. Ridgley prompted, scaffolded, and supported children during games to ensure that targeted skills were addressed.
Optional or extension activities may include opportunities for outdoor explorations, dramatizations, art, and the creation of videos or stories. Teachers can facilitate these activities, which help children connect with science and social studies content, by introducing the activity, providing materials, encouraging children to participate, asking questions, and/or debriefing with children after the activity has concluded.
Responding to Children’s Questions and Interests
The first graders at Mr. Ridgley’s school have been studying birds. One day, they notice a group of vultures gathered around a dead animal on the street, which leads to a lively conversation about scavengers and the beaks of birds of prey.
Jasmin: Mr. Ridgley, Mr. Ridgley, there are three big birds in the middle of the street!
Mr. Ridgley: Those birds are turkey vultures.
Jasmin: What are they doing?
Mr. Ridgley: It looks like they’ve found a dead squirrel in the street. Scavenger birds look for carrion, which are dead animals, to eat.
(A car drives by, and the birds hop away. Once the car has moved on, the birds return and pull the squirrel to the side of the road.)
Mr. Ridgley: What kind of beak would a bird need to eat a dead animal?
Kenneth: Probably a hook beak, like an eagle. I know eagles tear the flesh off the fish they catch.
The first-grade team decides to encourage children to investigate further the types of beaks birds have and the foods they like to eat. Over several days, they place bird feeders on the playground along with binoculars, drawing paper, colored pencils, and crayons. Children are eager to use the binoculars and soon notice how the birds they observe are different from the ones they have been studying. Mr. Ridgley often joins them, using his own set of binoculars and encouraging children to sketch what they see. Some draw pictures; others make lists of what they observe the birds doing and eating. During the last group meeting of the day, Mr. Ridgley invites students to share their observations and drawings.
Guided play is an effective tool for enhancing a curriculum and encouraging children to learn more about specific content. Children benefit from the materials, interactions, and scaffolds teachers offer when they observe children’s current knowledge, questions, and interests and work to encourage deeper learning (McDonald 2019).
The curriculum adopted by Mr. Ridgley’s district had an extensive study on birds that addressed comprehension skills and science standards. These specifically focused on making observations and learning how animals use their external parts to help them survive, grow, and meet their needs (NSTA 2013).
After seeing the children’s excitement about birds during recess, Mr. Ridgley and his colleagues discussed ways to support this interest, encourage autonomy, and facilitate guided play. They also asked the children what tools might help them observe better. By adding these materials and scaffolding children to notice and capture what they saw, the teaching team incorporated several important elements of guided play. These included
A clear learning target (Weisberg et al. 2016; Masterson & Bohart 2019; Skene et al. 2022; Zosh et al. 2022). As children observed and noticed the features of birds, Mr. Ridgley helped them compare what they observed to what they had read in class (“That bird seems to be collecting grain or seeds. What do you notice about its beak?”).
Materials to support the learning target (Weisberg et al. 2016; Zosh et al. 2022). By providing binoculars, children were better observers and could connect features they had read about in texts to the birds in their community.
Modeling and scaffolding (Weisberg et al. 2016; Zosh et al. 2022). While children were not required to engage in bird observations or documentation on the playground, Mr. Ridgley facilitated their learning by modeling specific behaviors, prompting, and asking questions. For example, one day on the playground, he pointed out how robins hopped along the ground looking for food while cardinals and sparrows landed on the bird feeders to eat. To capture his observations, he quickly sketched a robin with a worm in its mouth and a cardinal at the birdfeeder.
To assess children’s learning, Mr. Ridgley listened carefully and took anecdotal notes when they shared their observations. He specifically noted what children shared about types of beaks and how those beaks helped the birds find the food they needed to survive.
Introducing Games and Role-Playing
Mr. Ridgley’s class is working on retelling stories. Orion makes his way to a water-filled tub at the front of the classroom. He reaches for the plastic cow that his classmate, Yvelsi, is holding and says, “Just look at you! In the tub you go!” As Yvelsi places the cow in the tub, Orion sings, “In went the cow, wishy washy, wishy washy!” Next comes a plastic pig, followed by a plastic duck.
All of these animals are part of Mrs. Wishy Washy, a story by Joy Cowley that Mr. Ridgley has read to the children. “I noticed you have the animals in the tub,” he says as Orion and Yvelsi play. “Can you tell me the order they went in?” As the children share, Mr. Ridgley compares their sequencing to the one in the book.
Through games (as in the opening vignette) or role-playing, educators can scaffold children’s thinking and learning (Vogt et al. 2018). Engaging children in these activities has many benefits: Games promote community and autonomy as well as number sense and strategic thinking (Kamii, with Houseman 1999). Role-playing supports children’s use of language, vocabulary, turn taking, storytelling, and comprehension (Ripstein 2019; Rand & Morrow 2021). Both activities can provide important insights and anecdotal data about children’s progress toward learning targets (McDonald 2019).
Workstations or centers are logical times for educators to offer primary-grade children the materials, time, and space for role-playing. Mr. Ridgley intentionally included a role-playing spot in his classroom to encourage children to act out and retell the story of Mrs. Wishy Washy. In addition to the plastic animals, he offered puppets, other props, and picture cards so that children could engage with their peers in multiple ways. As they played, he provided prompts, questions, and guidance (asking children to retell the beginning, middle, and end of a story; encouraging them to act out the story’s problem and how it was resolved; prompting them to describe a character’s feelings).
Retelling stories is an evidence-based approach for building comprehension that helps children develop sequencing skills while strengthening their memory for story details (Foorman et al. 2016). It also builds vocabulary and can set the foundation for recognizing a story’s plot and characters (Foorman et al. 2016; Rand & Morrow 2021). Mr. Ridgley’s guided play activity aligned with the reading component of Tennessee’s English Language Arts Standards for first grade: For literature, to “retell stories, including key details, and demonstrate understanding of their central message or lesson” (Tennessee State Board of Education 2019, 30).
As children made connections, organized ideas, and demonstrated their understanding of Mrs. Wishy Washy, Mr. Ridgley assessed their learning through observations and asking questions. Sometimes, children used the classroom laptop to record their retellings, providing additional evidence of their understanding of a text.
Playing Outdoors with Intention
Mr. Ridgley and his class are discussing how animals protect themselves in their habitats. He introduces children to the concepts of adaptation and camouflage. Once they can define camouflage in their own words, he sets the stage for an outdoor play opportunity: During timed rounds, children will pretend to be birds, hunt for pretend worms of different colors, then graph the number and color of the worms they find.
As children run and play on the playground, Mr. Ridgley scatters the pretend worms. Curious, the children come over to see what is happening. Mr. Ridgley explains how the children can pretend to be birds. When given the cue, they gather up all the worms they can spot and start to graph their findings. As Mr. Ridgley expects, children find most of the worms that are red and light-colored during the first round. Finding the green ones takes more time and energy.
Through this guided play experience, first graders explored science and math concepts and words, learned about camouflage and adaptation, and began to investigate science variables (in this case, the color of the pretend worms, the color of the grass, and the number of worms available). The children used addition, subtraction, and number relationships to describe how many worms of each color they found during the timed rounds. They created pictographs using classroom materials and had conversations with each other and Mr. Ridgley about their understandings.
The teaching team determined that these experiences aligned with Tennessee’s learning standards in science, math, and literacy, and they observed children’s progress toward these goals after engaging with the materials. Yet in addition to the academic benefits, children were motivated to engage in the activity as they ran, interacted with their peers, and received adult guidance—all essential elements of guided play (e.g., Weisberg et al. 2016; Skene et al. 2022; Zosh et al. 2022).
Mr. Ridgley enhanced children’s conversations, learning, and interactions with materials through a variety of scaffolds and prompts. For example, as children returned with the worms they found during round one, they noticed their similar coloring. “Why do you think you found those worms first?” Mr. Ridgley asked as children made their pictograph. “What colors do you think you’ll find during the second round?” As children added to the pictograph after each round, Mr. Ridgley encouraged them to share their observations (“What do you notice?”) and to discuss why some colors were easier to find than others. He recorded their responses on a big sheet of paper, noting whose ideas were represented. This allowed him to assess and document children’s learning.
Committing to Guided Play
Guided play actively engages children and creates natural connections between learning targets and real experiences (Pyle & Danniels 2017). Yet integrating it into the primary-grade curricula can be challenging because of the limited play that often exists in school settings and the increasing use of prescribed curricula. Integration requires intentionality and agency to identify and capitalize on children’s interests, incorporate games and role-playing into lessons, and plan for outdoor experiences that will ensure children’s joyful, play-driven learning. Educators can begin by
Identifying opportunities for play that are provided within a required curriculum
Deeply studying the curriculum so that the questions they ask and the scaffolds they provide during guided play activities are intentional and challenging
Creating supplemental guided play experiences that align with the curricular expectations of the grade
Actively listening to children’s conversations about what they are learning and seeking out additional play experiences to help children make real-life connections
Identifying when in the day children can engage in games, role-playing, and playful learning activities that are aligned with the curriculum
About the Authors
Robyn Ridgley, EdD, is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. She has been a classroom teacher, home visitor, and administrator in inclusive early childhood programs. robyn.ridgley@mtsu.edu
Katherine A. Mangione, PhD, is a professor of elementary education at Middle Tennessee State University, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Katherine taught in early childhood and elementary classrooms for 10 years before moving to teacher preparation. Katherine.Mangione@mtsu.edu
Martin Ridgley, MEd, has been an elementary school teacher for 31 years. For the past 21 years, he has taught first grade at Hobgood Elementary in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
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Photographs: courtesy of authors. Copyright © 2026 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. See permissions and reprints online at NAEYC.org/resources/permissions.