play scenarios that others, including his friends and Nolan, join. He welcomes them into these scenarios. This has opened up a beautiful friendship with his brother and a much more enjoyable playdate experience with his peers. In contrast, if we go somewhere like the zoo, where there isn’ t room for [ largescale ] play scenarios, he doesn’ t know how to play with his peers or brother as much. This is a good reminder to us that if we are striving for collaborative and engaged play outside of school, we need to ensure we are going to places that facilitate open-ended, creative play. As parents, it has been essential and amazing that we have had these open lines of communication with Ben’ s teachers over the years. By sharing these moments back and forth, we are better able to facilitate peer and sibling relationships now and into the future.
A Co-Teacher’ s Perspective on Ben’ s Play
My co-teacher, Jess, was a huge part of a collaborative effort to develop a new way to create a sense of belonging and engagement in our classroom. While we both experienced the same situation, her unique perspective helps illustrate where we started and the process we went through to get to a place where large-scale play scenarios became an everyday occurrence in our classroom. Following is Jess’ s reflection.
Jess’ s Reflection
This period of time in our classroom was indeed pivotal. We were in the thick of data collection and observation, trying to navigate and support challenging behaviors that we knew Ben was using to communicate and we weren’ t quite able to interpret. I remember feeling pretty overwhelmed at the notion of trying to maintain“ control” of the classroom around this time. Everything that we had discussed during in-service training at the beginning of that school year was focused on directness, consistency, and visual cues, essentially maintaining predictability of expectations in the classroom. It felt like the harder we tried to maintain the rules of the classroom, the more amplified these challenges seemed. We knew that Ben needed us to listen closely, and we were trying our best.
I remember the first time I saw Ben create the mop from a chair and scarves to mop up the juice. His mom mentioned that Ben had seen someone using a mop to clean spilled juice at a grocery store, and it had made an impression on him. After drop-off, he fashioned his own very quickly. He began pushing the chair around the table. Some peers stood back for a while and watched, and I could see their minds working. I was worried that the class would burst into chaos with all 12 children pushing chairs around the room. I debated about how to guide( or end) the moment, and I chose to lean in— in part because Ben was so joyfully focused. I wanted to give him a really great day, to fill his bucket and to let his peers experience him at his best. Liz agreed. Choosing to break our own arbitrary rule about keeping chairs at the table was the best decision we could have made for our classroom. For weeks, Ben and his peers moved from the mopping scenario to lawn mowing with the chairs to building trains, garbage trucks, and delivery trucks. This play ended up influencing our children’ s preferred play activities for most of a semester.
74 Young Children
Fall 2026