Combining PBL and Play in Early Childhood Classrooms

As early childhood educators, we understand the vital role that play serves in young children’s learning and development. Yet over the past decade, a growing push for more “academic” instruction in early childhood settings has begun to shift the landscape. The familiar refrain “Kindergarten is the new first grade” suggests that preschool is quickly becoming the new kindergarten—higher academic expectations and less focus on social and emotional skill development. These pressures can be felt more keenly in historically marginalized communities, raising important questions about equity, developmentally appropriate practice, and keeping play at the heart of learning.

The Importance of Play in early childhood Classrooms

There is widespread research affirming the critical importance of play in early childhood. In play, children explore and construct understandings of the world around them. They build relationships with their peers, strengthen foundational skills, develop language, take risks, and experience joy. Educator and researcher Vivian Gussin Paley wrote that “play is the work of children”—that play is a vital component of children’s psychological, intellectual, and social development, and thus an essential part of early childhood education.

Project-based learning (PBL) presents an ideal space to hold play at the center of learning, naturally integrating children’s curiosity and creativity throughout the experience. Playful learning (or play-based learning—both terms are generally used interchangeably) is defined as a blend of free play, guided play, and teacher-directed play, highlighting that children’s play falls somewhere along this continuum or spectrum. All three types of play can (and should) appear in early childhood PBL—helping to increase engagement, deepen inquiry, and honor children’s developmental needs.

integrating play and pbl in Early Childhood

Project-based learning doesn’t replace play—it creates a space for all types of play to thrive. Whether through open-ended exploration, guided investigations, or teacher-facilitated games, each form of play can serve a purpose at different phases of a project.

Free Play: Discovering the Project

In PBL, teachers have an opportunity to determine project ideas based on children’s interests, which helps ensure engagement and authenticity in the project work. One essential way to do this is by observing free play. Early in the school year, make a point of watching children during outdoor play or while they engage in free choice centers (blocks, Legos, or drawing) in the classroom and take note of how they play. Based on your observations, you can create projects that reflect student interests and align those projects with academic goals.

For example, one year I noticed my 4-year-olds playing bakery in our Dramatic Play area using a cash register and pretend food. This inspired a PBL unit where the children actually ran their own bakery for the school community, selling homemade baked goods for 10 cents and under.

Guided Play: Developing the Project

Once a project idea emerges, you can deepen student interest and curiosity through guided play. In guided play, adults set the scene and children direct their own learning within it, and these learning experiences are connected to specific project learning goals. This has been compared to the idea of mise en place—a term from the culinary world that means “everything in its place”—where teachers plan intentional environments with specific materials, which leads to project-aligned exploration.

For example, in a project where my students designed their own musical instruments, our Dramatic Play area transformed into a space where instruments could be explored and played. Children investigated the differences between percussion, wind, and string instruments by taking on various roles in an orchestra, including one child who each day became the conductor.

This allowed children to build knowledge and skills related to the project in a playful learning context. Teachers can also set up spaces in the classroom for children to explore materials in response to a specific prompt or provocation. For example, when playing certain instruments, you might ask, “What do you feel when you hear these instruments?”

And just as important—if not more so—than creating these spaces and opportunities for learning is how teachers use language to extend conversations and deepen understanding. It’s essential for teachers to distinguish between thin and thick conversations: Thin conversations are brief and surface-level, while thick conversations involve rich back-and-forth exchanges, introducing new vocabulary, thoughtfully responding to children’s ideas, and expanding their understanding.

By intentionally engaging children in thick conversations, teachers activate the connections between play and PBL, helping children develop new knowledge and engage in more complex thinking.

Teacher-Directed Play: Practicing Skills with Joy

Teacher-directed play (sometimes called adult-planned and directed play) can also provide children with opportunities to build knowledge related to project content. These activities—often games or other structured experiences that might come from set curricula—reinforce project-related skills.

In our bakery project, I designed a math center where children used pennies on ten frames to strengthen their counting skills and explore how money is used in a bakery. We also created a whole class “Bakery Charades” game, where children acted out important vocabulary words and concepts like “ingredient,” “customer,” and “recipe.”

For a literacy center, children played a bakery-themed version of Go Fish, using picture cards of items that needed to be matched with their initial consonant—for example, pairing a picture of a cookie with the letter C or a picture of a tart with the letter T. These types of teacher-directed games help keep engagement high while reinforcing foundational skills and concepts, while also building knowledge and skills required for the PBL unit.

Planning for Play

When it comes to early childhood PBL, play isn’t optional—it’s foundational. Free play supports project ideation and launch; guided and directed play fuel knowledge-building and product development. Directed play can also support presentation preparation, as children play with ideas and practice for sharing their work.

When planning your next PBL unit, ask yourself: Where might play fit in? When we integrate play into our PBL design, we honor children’s developmental needs and deepen their learning.