How do you define play and choice time in early childhood classrooms? According to Renée Dinnerstein, play is an engine that drives learning. She writes, "during choice time, children choose to play in a variety of centers that have been carefully designed and equipped to scaffold children’s natural instinct for play.” In her book Choice Time, Renée gives us everything we need to set up choice-time centers that promote inquiry-based, guided play in a classroom. Renée also summarizes the research, describing the different kinds of play and why they are important. She says by giving your students choice time, and allowing them to engage in joyful, important, playful, age-appropriate work will empower them to become lifelong learners. 

We started our conversation on the different kinds of play (see below for a full transcript of our conversation): 

Renee:             Well, when I think about choice time, first I think about children and play. When children play, there are basically two different kinds of play. One play is free play. The other play is guided play. Free play is when children are out in the schoolyard and they're running around and someone picks up a stick and the stick becomes a sword or it becomes a magic wand. They have their own agenda. Nobody else is involved with that agenda other than the children. That's their agenda.

                        Guided play is when the teacher sets up different centers for play and investigation. The teacher decides what the room is going to look like, what the center is going to look like, how much space she or he is going to allot for the center, what materials will go in the center. Then what happens in that center is up to the children. The children are not guided in what they do. It's totally up to them, but the teacher has a very important role in setting up a play environment, an investigation environment, an exploration environment for the children.

Brett:       Why are choice time and play so important?

Renee:             Play is what drives children's learning. First of all, it's joyful. We want children to have joy in their life. That's really important. It's important to me as a teacher. Lev Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, I'm going to read something that he said. "In play, the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual everyday behavior. In play, he is, as it were, a head above himself." Children grow in play. They do things that extend their learning. It's an engine for driving the learning that children have. In choice time play, the children are able to actually incorporate all the other things that they've done all day, all through the week, and bring it with them into these centers that they have. What's really interesting is that when children are playing they get to practice what they think it's like to be an adult. Sometimes for an adult it's funny to watch it because it's taking it and twisting it a bit. It's the way that they think.

                        For example, in my book I talked about how children were playing doctor and mother came with a very sick baby. Jeffrey the doctor said, "Don't worry. Don't worry." He took out his injection needle and he jabbed the baby doll. The mother said,