Playing
“There is no success or failure in play, no holding to account, no mandatory achievement” (Root-Bernstein, 248). This quote illustrates my understanding of play as a learning opportunity for students that is intentionally distanced from traditional school concepts of right and wrong, allowing all students equal access to the initial thinking about a new topic. The playful activity I designed would be done at the start of the year to introduce students to the year-long theme of science and sports. Students would be divided into pairs and given one of the 15 cards below:
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Then, the pairs will have 5 minutes to figure out how to draw or act out the situation on the card in order to communicate it to their classmates. After each pair takes turns presenting their drawing or charade to the class, the pair will get to select up to four students to comment on the question: Is this a sport? Then, the class will vote on if it is a sport or not and the pair will move with their card to the “sport” or “not a sport” side of the room. This acting, drawing, and voting is the “playing” activity and would be followed by an activity where the students in each half of the room, the “sport” half and the “not a sport” half, will have to, as a large group, answer the following questions:
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For the “sport” group: find 3 cards in your group that are related to science and explain how they are each related to science.
For the “not a sport” group: find 3 cards in your group that are related to sports and explain how they are each related to sports. |
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This activity is playful because it has no specific purpose or objective beyond having students start to think about the connections between science and sports. Unlike later sports-related experiments, there is no one science concept that this introductory lesson is targeting. Instead, students are asked to engage in creation, discussion, and voting about these imaginative scenarios, focusing their experience on “the presymbolic drives of gut feelings, emotions, intuition, and fun” that characterize play (267). I can already visualize many of my students making strong arguments for what is and is not a sport. Furthermore, this activity is also playful because it a “relatively risk-free way” of introducing students to the topic (251). This activity is so far distanced from the notion of right and wrong answers that any prior struggles or negative expectations students had related to science will be irrelevant to their participation in the lesson.
It is also meaningful, especially in combination with the follow-up activity, because it provides students with kinesthetic and verbal experiences of possible actions that involve both science and sports. As we later do experiments related to science and sports throughout the year, students will have a reference point for how the two can be related in ways that they had not thought of before. The students do not have to know anything about the underlying science concepts to be able to come away from this activity having experienced that science and sports are connected. One important consideration while designing this activity was picking three different types of activities for the cards: those students would clearly label as sports, those students would clearly label as not sports, and more ambiguous examples. I also intentionally did not use the word “science” at all throughout the playing part of the activity because I thought its exclusion would further decrease the risk factor for students and make it seem more like natural charades and arguments about what constitutes a sport.