Supporting Guided Play in Prekindergarten Through Third Grade
By Sierra Dinges
One of the most beloved areas in my kindergarten classroom was the puppet corner. The children used it daily, retelling stories, creating characters, and collaborating in imaginative worlds of their own design. But one afternoon during a walkthrough, my principal stopped and said flatly, “School isn’t for playing. It’s for learning.” The puppet stand was a “distraction,” and I was told to take it down.
Instead, I took a different approach. I saw that one of the learning standards for language arts in my district was “retelling a story with key details.” I relabeled the puppet stand as a retelling station, connected it to our literacy standards, and created prompts for children to act out familiar texts. Suddenly, the puppet stand was no longer “frivolous”; it was “rigorous.” My principal celebrated the retelling station although the puppet stand had not changed.
How it was framed made the difference. I had a purpose for creating and using these materials, and I reflected on how to explain that purpose to others. What looked like free time to the principal was in reality an intentional, teacher-guided exploration toward specific learning goals. When I could articulate why children were playing and what they were working toward, it shifted how colleagues and administrators understood and valued the approach (Schmidtke 2025).
This experience is not unique. Many early childhood educators negotiate between what they know is developmentally informed, what is institutionally valued, and how decisions are discussed and made. Playful learning is an umbrella term for pedagogical approaches that incorporate children’s natural tendency toward play to learn about the world and people around them. It is foundational to early education and supports children’s cognitive, social, and emotional growth (Zosh et al. 2018). Yet among today’s standards-driven systems and accountability efforts, play’s role is increasingly diminished, particularly beyond preschool. Playful learning is often replaced by direct instruction and constrained by standardized benchmarks and accountability measures (Parker et al. 2022). Leading frameworks and recent research consistently emphasize that play and learning are not competing priorities; they are deeply interconnected (NAEYC 2022; Little 2023; NASEM 2024; Sanchez 2025).
Guided play, a specific form of playful learning, occupies the space between unstructured free play and direct instruction. It often resembles one of two scenarios. In the first, teachers create the environment around a learning goal, but children have the freedom to follow what interests them in the setting. In the second, children direct the learning experience, and the teacher guides with intentional comments or questions that extend the children’s interest and understanding (Weisberg et al. 2016). In both forms, guided play honors children’s agency while advancing academic content through educator facilitation (Weisberg et al. 2016; Pyle & Danniels 2017; Zosh et al. 2018). Guided play is not only developmentally grounded but also intellectually engaging, supports strong learning outcomes, and should be central across the prekindergarten-to-grade-3 continuum (NAEYC 2020; Zosh et al. 2022).
Guided play is also a powerful tool for advancing equity. Beginning with children’s strengths, interests, and social and cultural contexts, educators can guide children’s play in ways that validate their identities and experiences (Souto-Manning 2017). For example, researchers have found that multilingual learners are able to draw on their home languages and cultural knowledge as legitimate tools for learning rather than as obstacles to overcome (Souto-Manning 2017; Cekaite & Simonsson 2023). For children with disabilities, educators can use guided play to support multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression, such as offering different options for children to express their ideas (drawing, writing, movement, dictating) or using dramatic play or role play to practice targeted communication and social skills (Gauvreau et al. 2019).
I am a former classroom teacher who experienced firsthand the benefits of guided play in the early primary grades. Now, in the higher education setting, I advocate for ways to integrate research-based strategies with practice. In this article, I explore how guided play can develop content knowledge and skills in literacy and math across pre-K to grade 3. I use examples based on and adapted from a mixed-methods research study I conducted about elementary principals’ perspectives on playful pedagogy in these grades. I highlight steps educators can take to introduce guided play and illustrate what this looks like in action, including adaptations for multilingual learners and children with disabilities.
Guided Play’s Role in Developing Literacy and Math Knowledge
Research shows that guided play facilitates children’s learning in two crucial content areas: Literacy and math (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2020; Cekaite & Simonsson 2023; Wickstrom & Pyle 2025), including supporting literacy and language development for multilingual learners. For example, when teachers use open-ended questions, cultural artifacts, and story-related materials to gently scaffold children’s play, they create rich linguistic environments in which all children can actively participate (Cekaite & Simonsson 2023). A growing body of research also demonstrates that guided play can foster foundational math knowledge, with educators playing a crucial role before, during, and after play periods (Wickstrom & Pyle 2025). Indeed, guided play supports children trying out ideas, receiving feedback from others, and revisiting and refining their thinking, which builds both knowledge and skills across content areas (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2020).
Planning for guided play requires weaving together what educators know about children’s development and contexts with instructional goals and classroom environments. Standards provide a starting point, but planning must honor how children actually construct knowledge and meaning (Masterson 2022). This looks different across grade levels. A prekindergarten teacher might set up a dramatic play post office with environmental print and sorting bins to support literacy and classification, while a second-grade teacher might design a collaborative town-building project using blocks, maps, and play currency to integrate economics and spatial awareness. In both cases, the goal is the same: Meeting important learning goals through hands-on, playful experiences.
Guided play also demands intentional, timely scaffolding grounded in each child’s developmental trajectory (Weisberg et al. 2013). Teachers observe and document children’s thinking and behaviors, including misconceptions or emerging concepts, to guide future interactions. They deepen children’s existing ideas by acknowledging and encouraging what children know or do, modeling new concepts and skills, or offering related materials for children to explore without redirecting their attention away from their original interests. However, guided play does not end when materials are cleaned up; reflection is essential to consolidate learning (Wickstrom & Pyle 2025). Educators can use journals, discussions, anchor charts, or visual documentation to help children articulate their discoveries related to learning goals.
Guided Play in Action Across Classrooms
Guided play can be flexibly and intentionally embedded across academic content areas from preschool through third grade. While the form it takes varies by age, context, and instructional goals, its core features, like child agency, adult scaffolding, and purposeful learning, remain consistent. The following examples illustrate how guided play supports meaningful learning across the early childhood curriculum and age groups.
Social Studies and Literacy: Living Wax Museum in Third Grade
Mr. Chen is a third-grade teacher in a public school in Colorado. Every month, he meets with his fellow teachers in collaborative planning sessions encouraged by his principal. Together, they discuss ways to meet early learning standards through integrated, hands-on experiences. This month, they are looking at standards related to comparing primary and secondary sources and examining how people from diverse backgrounds have shaped history (social studies) as well as informational writing, research inquiry, and oral presentation (literacy).
Based on their conversation, Mr. Chen designs a three-week project called the Living Wax Museum that integrates research, biographical writing, and performance. He provides a list of historical figures to his class as a starting point; however, the children are free to research and propose their own choices. They can select from a list of US figures who reflect a diversity of races, cultures, and genders, including Ruby Bridges, Dolores Huerta, Neil Armstrong, and Harriet Tubman.
Maya, a multilingual learner, expresses an interest in choosing someone who is Latina like her. Mr. Chen suggests labor activist Dolores Huerta. He also provides some materials to get Maya started, including a biography available in English and Spanish and a collection of artifacts and images that are connected to Huerta’s life and work.
Maya actively engages with these materials. She explores the objects, including playing with a toy typewriter to see how it works. After looking at a photo of a United Farm Workers’ rally in Coachella, California, she role-plays with a classmate, imagining how Huerta organized this march. Maya also reads letters and speeches Huerta wrote in the late 1960s. She uses these materials and experiences to write a speech in the voice of Huerta about workers’ rights. She practices the speech on her own and in front of different partners over the next few days.
On presentation day, Maya, dressed in an outfit inspired by images of Huerta, stands frozen. When a visitor taps her shoulder, she delivers her speech. At the end of the session, she and her classmates excitedly run to each other, exchanging their experiences.
The Living Wax Museum illustrates what guided play can look like when woven intentionally into the primary grades. Mr. Chen designed the project based on his state’s learning standards, and he relied on collaboration with his colleagues and support from school leadership.
The experience involved a blend of child-directed and teacher-directed experiences from the beginning. Children chose who they would study, drove their own research process, and decided how to inhabit their historical figure in performance. At the same time, Mr. Chen curated materials to align with each child’s interests and needs. He planned an environment in which the children could engage with history in a tangible, playful way, where they could handle objects, examine images, and immerse themselves in a historical world. Additionally, he structured the research process and designed the presentation context in ways that gave the work its purpose and audience while keeping the learning goals in mind. The children conducted research, wrote informational texts, and presented to an audience through meaningful, playful experiences. He also created entry points and ongoing supports for all learners. This demonstrates that guided play, when planned thoughtfully, can advance both content goals and equity (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2020; Cekaite & Simonsson 2023).
While Maya is rehearsing, Mr. Chen observes that she is reading her Dolores Huerta speech quietly and with minimal expression. Mr. Chen says to her, “Your words are powerful. Let’s think about how Dolores Huerta might have felt. If you were asking farmworkers to stand up for their rights, how would your voice sound?” Maya reflects, then shifts to a louder, more expressive delivery.
On the day of the Living Wax Museum, she keeps in mind something else Mr. Chen had said to her: “What if you picked one sentence to say with strong feeling? Which matters most?” Throughout the experience, she delivers her speech with confidence, using eye contact and gestures.
In this vignette, Mr. Chen did not correct Maya or take over her performance; instead, he asked questions that invited her to connect emotionally with her subject and make her own decisions about how to bring the speech to life. This reflects what the research describes as timely scaffolding grounded in a child’s developmental trajectory: Observing where a learner is, meeting them there, and offering just enough support to move them forward without redirecting their agency (Weisberg et al. 2013, 2016). For a multilingual learner performing in their second language before an audience, this was also a moment of equity. Mr. Chen’s coaching affirmed that Maya’s voice was capable and powerful.
Although the vignette focused on one child’s project, Mr. Chen structured scaffolds throughout to ensure everyone in his class could access the learning goals of the Living Wax Museum. Gerald, a child with dyslexia, used speech-to-text for drafting and received a highlighted, large-print script. Children who were excelling in their research were challenged to connect their figures to current events. Collaborative rehearsals incorporated sentence stems, such as “I learned _____”; “I wonder _____”; and “What if you tried _____?” Individualized scaffolding is central to effective guided play (Weisberg et al. 2013, 2016).
Mr. Chen monitored children’s progress by reviewing their research notebooks, in which they took notes on the primary and secondary sources they used. He reviewed their drafted and revised speeches, and he used performance rubrics focused on historical accuracy, perspective taking, and oral delivery. He also gathered information from families. Mr. Chen noted that Maya’s family shared that she had practiced frequently at home. This points to something research consistently affirms: When children have genuine agency over their learning, their motivation follows (Weisberg et al. 2016; Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2020). The Living Wax Museum was not a break from academic work; it was the vehicle for it.
Guided Play in Math Instruction
First-grade teacher Ms. Rivera works in a public school where leaders and staff are trying to incorporate more nature-based learning into their curriculum. She has also heard the children in her classroom talk about how they wish they could go outside and play in the snow, so she designs a Snowball Sale project. It is a great opportunity to bring repeated addition and early multiplication concepts to life outdoors and to work toward Colorado’s first-grade mathematics standards, which focus on solving word problems using objects and repeated addition. The activity will also prepare children for the grouping and multiplication concepts coming in second grade.
Ms. Rivera creates several “selling stations” that can each accommodate up to five children. For the first 30 minutes of the activity, children work in small groups to create snowballs of all sizes and sort them into sets of one, two, or three. During this process, Ms. Rivera prompts them with questions, such as “Can you sort 13 snowballs into sets of 2?” or “Should larger snowballs cost more than smaller ones? Why or why not?” The children decide what the sizes of the snowballs will be and how they will group them. Finally, they set the prices. After a spirited discussion over how much more a larger snowball should cost, the class comes to an agreement, and one group writes these prices on a board nearby.
When the sale begins, teachers and students from other classes as well as administrative staff pass by, ordering snowballs of various quantities. Mr. Schulz, a fourth-grade teacher, places an order for two bundles of three snowballs. The children first determine whether they have enough snowballs to fill an order, and they figure out that Mr. Schulz is ordering six snowballs in total.
“One set of three snowballs costs $4,” says one of the group members.
“So how much money do I owe you in total?” Mr. Schulz asks.
The children consider this question, and after a moment of contemplation, Sally says, “Four plus four equals eight. So that means you need to pay $8.”
Elsewhere, Ms. Rivera observes that Alan, who has been struggling with addition in word problems, is especially enthusiastic during the sale. He is able to make calculations and fulfill orders more easily than when solving problems on the worksheet from the math curriculum package. Naima, a multilingual learner whose home language is Arabic, uses a chart Ms. Rivera has made that allows her to communicate with buyers about the pricing.
After the Snowball Sale ends and the children return to their classroom, Ms. Rivera hands out paper and writing utensils so that each group can record how many snowballs they sold, which size snowballs sold the best, and how much money they made. Ms. Rivera structures the questions as word problems to reinforce the mathematical concepts behind the project.
This vignette demonstrates how guided play can make abstract mathematical concepts accessible and meaningful for young children. Children chose their own grouping strategies, negotiated with partners, and decided how to fulfill each order, giving them genuine agency over their mathematical reasoning. At the same time, Ms. Rivera’s role was intentional by
Prompting children to sort snowballs by size and quantity
Posing challenges, in the form of questions, that nudged children just beyond their current understanding and prompted them to articulate their thinking (Wickstrom & Pyle 2025)
Providing concrete, visual materials to help children build the foundational number sense that later supports more formal mathematical reasoning (Wickstrom & Pyle 2025)
Choosing an outdoor setting with nature materials to encourage access and participation across learners
Placing children into groups so that peer partnerships provided natural language modeling throughout
Incorporating visual quantity cards and gesture-based prompts so that multilingual learners could demonstrate mathematical understanding without relying solely on verbal explanation
Crucially, school leaders supported this kind of experiential, outdoor learning by protecting instructional time outside the classroom and encouraging teachers to design learning experiences that connected mathematical concepts to real-world contexts. For more specific recommendations for school leaders, see “Supporting Educators Through Professional Learning and Leadership” below.
Supporting Educators Through Professional Learning and Leadership
Sustaining guided play depends on an ecosystem in which principals, instructional coaches, district leaders, and instructional teams from across grade levels share a coherent vision of developmentally appropriate curriculum and teaching and are equipped with resources to meaningfully implement it (Pyle et al. 2020). To that end, school leaders can
Create time and space for collaborative planning. One school implemented monthly cross-grade professional learning communities where prekindergarten-to-grade-2 teachers planned integrated units, observed each other’s classrooms, and debriefed using video clips and children’s work, building shared language and collective engagement.
Use observation tools with a developmental lens. Rather than relying solely on compliance, leaders can develop walkthrough protocols that focus on student engagement, material use, peer interaction, and teacher facilitation. They can ask “What are children doing?”; “What are they learning?”; “How is the teacher supporting the children without taking over the play?”
Model learning alongside staff. When leaders participate in co-teaching, facilitate stations, or engage in book studies on playful pedagogy, they demonstrate that play (including guided play) is a valid, standards-aligned approach. Engaging in book studies can help connect practice, coaching, and supervision within one school or district (Tiong & Lee 2025).
When teachers, leaders, and instructional teams are given time, tools, and trust, guided play becomes a sustainable, impactful, and joyful approach to teaching and learning for all children.
Adapting Guided Play for Different Content Areas
The two previous vignettes show how guided play takes different forms (dramatic play, design challenges, interactive simulations), but it shares consistent features. These include learner agency, identified academic goals, meaningful contexts, and responsive adult support (Weisberg et al. 2013, 2016; Zosh et al. 2018). They challenge the assumption that play must be set aside in the name of academic learning. Instead, they demonstrate that guided play is a powerful method for aligning instruction with how young children learn: Joyfully, collaboratively, and with purpose. “Additional Examples of Guided Play Across Pre-K–Grade 3” below offers more ideas for how educators can use guided play to meet content area goals. These are examples drawn from my research and the early learning standards relevant to participants in my study (Colorado Department of Education 2019, 2026; NGSS Lead States 2013).
Getting Started with Guided Play
To begin integrating guided play, the key is to start small, build confidence, and document learning intentionally. Rather than overhauling a curriculum or classroom environment, educators can identify a content area or part of the day where hands-on exploration feels feasible; for example, a kindergarten math center for pattern making or a second-grade science investigation station. Then, they can commit to one week of intentional observation, with guided play and learning goals in mind. What do they see happening? What is surprising? What do children understand that existing assessment might miss? Educators can make academic connections visible to themselves, administrators, and families by sharing lesson plans, center labels, or anchor charts. This can show how learning through guided play aligns with learning standards. When my principal questioned the puppet corner, what changed was how I named and connected it to literacy goals.
Educators can also use different tools and techniques to observe and document children’s engagement and learning. They can capture photos of structures, record 15-second conversation clips, or jot down questions children ask, then review weekly to identify patterns and next steps. They can share these moments with families through different avenues, such as newsletters or family communication apps. When families see their children problem solving during play, they can become advocates for playful pedagogy. Educators can also seek colleagues who share their commitment to developmentally appropriate practices. Finally, they can consider engaging in a book study featuring a text about intentional teaching, guided play, or developmentally appropriate practice. They can also observe each other’s classrooms and talk about what is working and what could be changed, or they can share challenges over lunchtime discussions. Professional learning communities provide both practical strategies and emotional sustenance when external pressures mount (Yang et al. 2023).
Ultimately, guided play challenges educators, leaders, and others to rethink the architecture of early learning—not as a tug-of-war between play and academics, but as an integrated model where purposeful, playful learning fosters learning and developmental goals. The question is no longer whether play belongs in early childhood classrooms. Rather, it is whether educators will reclaim it as the foundation upon which meaningful, joyful early education is built.
About the Author
Sierra Dinges, EdD, is a department lead and professor at Red Rocks Community College in Lakewood, Colorado. Her work focuses on playful learning, pedagogical leadership, and policy. She advances equitable, research-informed practices that connect early learning systems across the birth–5 to K–12 continua.
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