Imaginative Play is Thinking Play

Imaginative play is the backbone of most of the play we see in our preschool classrooms. It might be making art or building with blocks or playing house or putting on costumes and creating entire worlds. It's the opposite of our cultural stereotypes of "school" because it's not about "just the facts." On the contrary, it's about counter-factual thinking, which is, as it sounds, using our imaginations to create something that isn't, in fact, real.

They use their imaginations to paint a "spooky ghost with spider legs" or build a Lego laser or bake a pan of play dough muffins. They play games in which they are mommies or baddies or baby snow leopards. Sometimes critics of play-based learning point this out as a nothing more than a silly waste of time, but nearly everything around us that isn't nature is a product of counter-factual thinking. Someone had to first imagine a vehicle that propelled itself with a motor before it could ever become a reality.

Imaginative play is more than invention, of course. It's also how children come to understand their world. When they pretend to cook they are exploring, from the inside, something that is obviously important to understand. Dress up play is a gateway to storytelling and ultimately literacy. It's also a part of how we develop empathy and understanding of others. 

The imaginative play of children often seems dreamlike as they cobble together their play from fragments of past experiences, loose parts, compromise, and agreement. In imaginative play there can be two queens, talking gorillas, and healthy cookies. An orange rind can become a rainbow. A stick can be . . . well, almost anything.

Yesterday, I wrote of our memories as something we construct, or as experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett put it, an "imaginative reconstruction," born anew, altered, adapted, and improved, each time we evoke them. He also argued that imagination is a product of memory. Indeed, the process of assembling bits and pieces into a cohesive product of imagination is, in our brain, remarkably similar to the process we use to call up memories. 

As neuroscientists Charan Ranganath puts it, "the hippocampus and the DMN (default mode network) . . . function at the crossroads between memory and imagination by allowing us to extract the ingredients from past experiences and recombine them into new creations. In other words, our brains are not memorization organs, but rather thinking organs, and imagination, not being a silly waste of time at all, stands at the center of it.

When we attempt to make children stop playing in order to force-feed them academics we are, in a pathetic adult-centric way, attempting to control their memories, the raw material they have at their disposal for thinking. And what dull stuff it is. Foolishly, we declare that all children must be forced to know this or that, ignoring the fact that our brains have evolved to be singular, to take in meaningful information and transform it in unique and idiosyncratic ways (i.e., by thinking) into something else. That is the entire story of human evolution.

And that is exactly what children are doing as they engage in their imaginative play. They are making memories and meaning, meaning and memories, in a creative cognitive process, which is, at the end of the day, what our brains are meant to do.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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