Is unstructured play a waste of time? What I learned as a teacher and mom
The cereal box lighthouse was taking up the entire right third of our living room rug last Sunday when I checked my phone and remembered my 7-year-old Leo’s weekly reading log was due Monday. Twenty minutes of independent reading, minimum, per the 2nd grade homework policy, and it was already 4:30. I leaned against the dryer, holding a warm stack of his faded sweatpants, and watched him smooth a piece of packing tape over the edge of a toilet paper roll tower, muttering about wind resistance so his lighthouse doesn’t blow over when he runs his toy whales past it. My husband wandered in with a refill of iced coffee, nodded at the mess on the floor, and mouthed, You gonna make him switch? That’s when the question hit me, the same one I get at least once a month at parent-teacher conferences: Is this thing a waste of time?
Last month, a mom of one of my 3rd grade students pulled me aside after conferences and asked it straight. Her son spends every single after school hour drawing cartoon cats on scrap paper, she said. He’d rather draw than do his math homework, than practice spelling, even than go outside to play. Is this just a waste of time? Should I be making him stop and do something more productive? I get it. I’ve had that thought myself a hundred times. When Leo spends 45 minutes sorting his rock collection by size instead of doing his 10 minutes of math facts practice, when my stepdaughter spends an hour rearranging her sticker book instead of studying for her vocabulary quiz, that little voice in the back of my head says, All this time could be used for something that matters.
A few weeks ago, we finished state testing a full period early, so I told the kids they could do whatever they wanted for the last hour of the day. Most pulled out their tablets to play games, but three boys dragged all the dented cardboard blocks I’ve kept in the back of my closet for years out onto the rug and started building a zoo. They worked that entire hour, arguing over where the giraffe enclosure should go, bracing the wall of the monkey cage when it kept falling, adding a little pond out of a plastic tray for the seals. At the end of the day, one of their moms emailed me. She said her son told her about the zoo, and she was wondering if that free time could be used for extra reading practice instead, since her son was a few levels behind where he should be. She didn’t say it, but I could hear the question in her email: Is this a waste of time?
I used to feel like I had to have a perfect answer, but lately I’ve been leaning into what I’ve actually seen after 12 years in the classroom. Most of the time, that “wasted” time is teaching kids skills that homework and flashcards can’t. When Leo spent three days tweaking his lighthouse to make it stand up straight, he was doing more problem solving than he would have done in a full week of math worksheets. When he told me the whole story of Bob the lighthouse keeper who rescues lost whales, he was practicing narrative structure and vocabulary that makes his reading comprehension better than any 20 minutes of forced reading could do that night. That doesn’t mean homework doesn’t matter, or that every activity is equal. Last week, Leo spent an hour scrolling through YouTube shorts of other people building Lego castles, and that was a waste of time. He wasn’t creating, he wasn’t problem solving, he was just zoned out. That’s the line I’ve started drawing, that I tell parents to look for too: if they’re actively engaged in doing something, even something that looks messy or pointless, it’s not a waste.
I have three little things I do now that keep me from ruining a good chunk of their time because I’m worried about productivity. First, I wait 10 minutes before I interrupt. If I’m staring at them sorting rocks or drawing cats and panicking about the homework that’s not getting done, I set a timer for 10 minutes and just watch. Last month I almost interrupted Leo on a car ride to school because I thought he was just staring out the window, wasting time we could use to practice spelling. I waited 10 minutes, and realized he was counting every red car he saw, adding up how many trucks passed us, and sorting all vehicles by where they were going. He was doing math without even knowing it, and he was way more engaged than he would have been if I’d pulled out his spelling flashcards. Second, if I do need to shift to another activity, I let them finish their thought first, and ask them to tell me about what they did. It takes two minutes, it validates what they’ve been working on, and they almost never fight the shift. When I had to break down the zoo in my classroom to line up for dismissal, I had each of the three boys share one thing they were proud of about their zoo before they packed up. They put everything away without complaining, instead of dragging their feet like they usually do when we have to stop a fun activity. Third, if it’s not an emergency deadline, shift the homework instead of ending the activity. That Sunday with the lighthouse, I didn’t make Leo stop building. I just wrote a little note to his teacher saying we’d do the reading first thing Monday morning, and that’s what we did. It didn’t wreck anything, and Leo got to finish his project.
I still get it wrong sometimes. Last week I made my stepdaughter stop braiding friendship bracelets for her friends to study for her algebra quiz, and later I found out she was using fraction measurements to get the braids even, practicing the exact same concepts the quiz was on. We still have the lighthouse’s cardboard base in our recycling bin, waiting for Leo to turn it into something else next weekend. I still catch that little voice in my head asking if whatever they’re doing right now is a waste of time. But lately, I’ve been trying to swap that question for another one: What are they learning right now? Nine times out of ten, the answer is more than I would have expected. It doesn’t show up on a homework log or a test score this week, but it shows up later, when they know how to fix a problem that doesn’t have a right answer, or how to tell a good story, or how to stick with something that’s hard until it works. Some days that’s more than enough.
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