Is Unstructured Play A Waste Of Time? What A 3rd Grade Teacher Has Learned
It’s 4:15 on a Tuesday in October, the heat in the conference room is cranked too high, and I’m borrowing Leo’s mom’s pen because mine ran out of ink halfway through progress notes. She twists her wedding ring after I tell her Leo’s reading and math are right on track, then leans in, like she’s about to ask something she’s been holding back.
“Everyone keeps asking why he just stacks rocks at recess,” she says. “His grandma says it’s a total waste of time. Should I be making him join the other kids for four square? Or sign him up for after-school soccer so he stops messing around with stones?”
I nod, because I’ve gotten this exact question at least once a semester for the last 12 years. I’ve watched Leo stack those rocks for 10 weeks straight. Every day after lunch, he heads straight for the cracked retaining wall at the edge of the playground, dumps his pocket full of collected pebbles, sorts them by size, stacks them in different formations, knocks them down when they fall, and starts over. Once after a rainstorm, I watched him pour water from a puddle between the cracks to see how it would flow through his stacks. He never bothers anyone, and he never seems bored. He just… stacks.
I used to think this was a waste of time too, when I first started teaching. I had a whole unwritten rule that recess was for active social play, and I’d nudge any kid who wandered off alone to go join a game. I worried they were falling behind socially, wasting time they could be spending learning to work in groups. That changed eight years ago, when I had a second grader named Mia who spent every free period twisting pipe cleaners into tiny overlapping loops. Her parents came to conference convinced she was wasting time, that she was avoiding harder work because she couldn’t focus. We agreed to get her some extra testing for learning struggles, and it turned out she was working through spatial reasoning problems in her head. She was eight, and she was trying to figure out how many loops she could wrap around each other before the whole structure collapsed. It wasn’t wasting time. It was her own personal science project.
After that, I started paying more attention to the things adults call “wasting time.” Almost all of them turn out to be self-directed learning that just doesn’t come with a finished product or a grade to show for it. The trick I tell parents now is to do a three-day observation before you decide it’s a waste. That’s it, no big changes, just one sentence at the end of each day jotting down what you saw: does your kid come back to the activity again the next day? Do they change what they’re doing when something goes wrong? Do they seem focused, or are they just fidgeting and avoiding something else? It’s low effort, no fancy journal needed, and it tells you way more than any grandma’s opinion or your own worry.
I told Leo’s mom to do that three-day check, both with his recess rocks and his after-dinner Lego sorting. She told me later she’d been teasing him for months for sorting his Lego by shape instead of building anything. After three days of writing down what she saw, she realized he adjusted his sorting system every time he added new pieces, and he could grab exactly the size he needed in 10 seconds when he did decide to build. That’s not wasting time—that’s him building a system that works for him.
Another small thing I encourage parents and teachers to do: if you do need to end the activity to move on to something else, don’t frame it as stopping a waste of time. Instead, acknowledge that it matters. If your kid is watching ants when it’s time to leave for school, say “Mark your ant hill with that stick so we can come back after dinner” instead of “Quit messing around with those bugs.” If it’s time to leave recess, tell your kid to mark their rock stack so no one knocks it over. It takes two extra seconds, and it tells them their work is worth coming back to, even if we can’t see the point of it right now.
If your observation shows they’re actually avoiding something—if they’re hanging out by the wall every recess because kids are mean to them on the four square court, or they’re sorting Lego for two hours to avoid homework they don’t understand—you’ll see that in the notes. They won’t be focused, they won’t come back to the same activity day after day, and they’ll look restless instead of calm. That’s when you step in and solve the actual problem. But if they’re engaged, if they choose to come back, that’s not avoidance. That’s choice.
A month after Leo’s conference, his mom emailed me a photo of the hydraulic crane he built for the school science fair. He’d sorted all his Lego by size months earlier, so when he was designing the crane, he knew exactly where to find every piece he needed to get the arm to move correctly. It got honorable mention. He still stacks rocks at recess, too. A couple weeks ago, he started letting a shy first grader who also likes collecting rocks stand next to him and sort. Last week I walked past the wall and saw they’d built a little ramp out of stacked rocks for a toy car the first grader brought. They were arguing about how steep to make it, testing it, knocking it down when it collapsed, and stacking it again.
I still get asked at least once a month if some unstructured, low-output kid activity is a waste of time. Is it a waste if my kid watches people play video games on YouTube instead of playing them? Is it a waste if they draw the same dinosaur over and over instead of trying new things? Is it a waste if they sit on the sidewalk and watch pigeons for 20 minutes instead of finishing their reading log?
I always tell people the same thing. What looks like wasting time is almost always time your kid spends learning how to focus, how to solve problems on their own terms, and how to enjoy doing something just because they like it. That’s not a waste. It’s just work that doesn’t fit on a progress report. Some days it still feels a little odd to let them mess around when there are so many structured activities to get to, so much homework to finish. It doesn’t wrap up into a neat end result most of the time. But so far, all the most interesting things my students have learned have started with something someone called a waste of time.
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