“Crawl furiously!” I call out. The giggles ripple through the room as Abdi scurries across the rug. Now it’s Nayani’s turn. She looks nervously expectant as I randomly select one verb and one adverb from red and blue cups. “Dance sleepily!” More giggles erupt as she performs a lazy grand jeté to the other side of the circle. Instead of moaning and groaning about learning adverbs, my 4th grade class is animated and engaged. A few days later, when I ask students to add an adverb to their narrative writing, they remember the examples from our dramatic play and can conjure up the precise adverb to describe the action in their stories more vividly.
It’s no secret that children are powerfully creative beings. We adults often look back with longing at the pure freedom of kids’ imaginative play, whether working out the complexities of daily life by playing “house” and “school” or by inventing fantastic worlds with scenarios like “Mermaid Land” or “Life on Mars.” This kind of play serves an important role in children’s development. As psychologist Lev Vygotsky famously explained, “A child’s play is not simply a reproduction of what he has experienced, but a creative reworking of the impressions he has acquired. He combines them and uses them to construct a new reality, one that conforms to his own needs and desires” (2004). To observe children immersed in their imagination is to observe joy.
To observe children immersed in their imagination is to observe joy.
But imagination is on the decline. Educators have been grappling for decades with the effects of video games, social media, and hyper-scheduled extracurricular activities on children’s opportunities to engage their imaginations during unstructured leisure time—what Jonathan Haidt aptly terms the transition from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” (Haidt, 2024). However, we educators also have a critical role to play in cultivating the imaginative strengths that our students bring to the classroom.
Moving Away from Play
In recent years, curriculum standards have been pushing imagination out of our elementary grade classrooms. The K–5 Common Core State Standards—and most standardized tests in the elementary years—focus heavily on developing students’ ability to analyze text and identify evidence to support their analysis. There is a heavy focus on interpreting the work of others and far less emphasis on producing personal creative work. School districts push analytical academic skills earlier; every elementary teacher is familiar with the adage “kindergarten is the new 1st grade.”
But having students write analytical essays in elementary school, so they have the most time possible to refine necessary subskills, ignores their other developmental needs and strengths as they progress through early and middle childhood to adolescence. Young children aren’t just smaller and less capable adolescents; they are in a unique developmental stage of growth and development, with fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world and learning. With an increased focus on “rigor” in the earliest years of schooling, we are missing the opportunity to tap into the natural curiosity and energy for learning that is the hallmark of childhood.
Creative play and projects were on the decline well before 2020, but my colleagues around the country have shared stories of districts intensifying their focus on recovering from pandemic-related “learning loss” by increasing instructional minutes. Education researchers like Tom Kane of Harvard University and Sean Reardon of Stanford University encouraged state leaders to “require districts to resubmit their plans for spending the federal [pandemic relief] money and work with them and community leaders to add instructional time” (2023). While the concern seems logical, ground-level implementation misaligns with student needs post-pandemic; added instructional time has come at the expense of social time, playtime, and content outside of the heavily tested areas of math and reading. Educators have reported that students have underdeveloped social-navigation skills and are experiencing more frequent and intense dysregulation (Coker, Gootman, & Backes, 2023; Prothero, 2023).
Is a relentless focus on skill acceleration in the early grades what our youngest learners really need right now?
Is a relentless focus on skill acceleration in the early grades what our youngest learners really need right now? As play expert Sandra Russ explains,
The creativity inherent in pretend play is highly effective: it supports children in working out ideas and expressing themselves. . . . [P]lay of all kinds helps humans and other species learn to account for and handle unexpected events, establish and practice social relationships, self-assess and consider risks, stimulate mental development, and practice imagination and creative adaptation. (Russ & Dillon, 2011)
Recentering imaginative play might allow our youngest learners to thrive.
Bringing Creativity Back into the Classroom
When I think back on my own experience as a 4th grade student 40 years ago, I had little practice with the kind of textual analysis I was expected to demonstrate in high school, college, and graduate school. But I did have opportunities to create. I wrote a stage adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for a class of 2nd graders and directed their performance. As part of a pumpkin-decorating contest, I figured out how to use a clothes hanger and my little brother’s old clothing stuffed with newspaper to create a pumpkin-man whose face I can still recall. A friend and I invented (an imaginary) model pack of magical bubble gum and wrote a 1980s-style television jingle to advertise it. Those formative experiences with creation weren’t just memorable; they pushed me to think in new ways and taught me the possibilities that come from creating what doesn’t yet exist.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Karen Engels
A student designs earthquake-resistant structure models.
To increase joy in our elementary schools, we need to recommit ample time for imaginative play. However, play need not be limited to unstructured recess time; we can center playful learning without sacrificing our commitment to standards-based instruction. There are many ways to incorporate imaginative play within instruction; in fact, playful learning is when students are often most engaged. The opportunity to imagine hooks young learners to make sense of complex material. I’ll share a few of the ways my 4th grade teaching team brings play into our classrooms.
1. Let’s Get Dramatic!
Role-plays, Reader’s Theater, and dramatic adaptations of content texts are all terrific ways to infuse our classrooms with imaginative joy. I’ve seen 4th graders light up when we read plays based on historical events we’ve studied. For example, when we study the Lowell Mill strikes of the 1800s, students deepen their connection to U.S. historical figures by inhabiting characters and role-playing as New England farming “families” who weigh the pros and cons of sending daughters to Lowell. After imagining themselves in the shoes of the Lowell Mill girls who fought for worker protections, students’ persuasive writing comes alive as they try to convince the government to limit the legal workday to 10 hours. Drama in the classroom isn’t just about joy; it’s a deeply effective strategy for helping students make meaningful connections to complex content.
2. When Students Take the Driver’s Seat
The chance to imagine motivates children to practice important social skills. At the end of the year, my students take an imaginary “road trip” to five regions of the country whose history they studied in earlier units. In groups, they use computation skills to plan an itinerary and a detailed budget. They make strategic decisions about how to manage their money for food, lodging, and transportation. Through digital resources, they “visit” a national park and a historical site in their destination region, making detailed maps and writing postcards to describe their trip to families back home. Their delight in planning this pretend adventure is palpable. They also work out compromises: “What if we stay at a campsite for a few more nights so that we have enough money for a fancy dinner when we get to New Mexico?” or “But if you spend that much on souvenirs, we won’t have enough money to actually visit all the places on our list—what’s more important, the experience or some stuff?” Through immersion in an imaginary scenario, students build the social-navigation skills that come through play, such as perspective-taking, flexible thinking, and problem solving.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Karen Engels
A student's mammal collage is inspired by paper-cut illustrations in the book "Creature Features."
Projects can also allow students to demonstrate content knowledge in creative ways. My colleague Jocelyn Marshall designed a project inspired by Steve Jenkins’s and Robin Page’s book Creature Features (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), during which students showcase their understanding of mammal adaptations by writing a mock interview with a mammal. This format allows the students’ voices to shine. The students also make a collage of the mammal in Jenkins’s paper-cut illustration style. The excitement in the room during these project blocks is visible, but, just as importantly, students are building their knowledge, written communication skills, and imaginations.
3. Sparking Play Through Story Time
A simple, concrete opportunity for strengthening imagination is allowing older elementary students the joy of simply listening as a teacher reads aloud from a juicy novel. Making time for students to purely enjoy imagining the “movie in their mind” strengthens their love of literature, their sense of community, and their ability to visualize, which is such a critically important metacognition strategy when reading independently. I’ve seen 4th graders using recess time to act out scenes, imagine sequels, or role-play using characters they’ve met through novels we’ve read aloud, inspired by Joyce Hansen’s rich dialogue and characters in The Gift-Giver (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1980) or Kate DiCamillo’s exquisite description in The Tiger Rising (Candlewick Press, 2001).
A Mindset Worth Nurturing
Our schools must recenter the crucial skill of imagination. Our youngest learners’ imaginations are irrepressible, and we need to continue to nurture their gifts. Creativity can’t be measured on standardized instruments; we can’t score a child’s poem on a scale of 1–4. And yet, as we grapple with the enormous challenges of the current moment—political polarization, climate change, AI’s potential disruptions, unspeakable violence in the world—what we need to cultivate in the next generation is not just the ability to analyze what is. We need young people who can imagine what isn’t yet. Imagining what is possible is the path to joy.
