Is Unstructured Play A Waste Of Time? A Teacher Explains What Kids Actually Learn
Last month, I sat across from a mom at a 2nd grade parent-teacher conference, stirring a lukewarm coffee that had been sitting on my desk since the start of back-to-back meetings. She pushed my printed copy of her son’s weekly schedule toward me, tapping her index finger on the line that reads 1:15-2:00 PM Free Exploration. “I don’t mean to overstep,” she said, and then asked the question I get at least once a month: Is this a waste of time?
My neighbor’s 2nd grader does an extra 30 minutes of reading fluency and math drills during this slot. He’s already testing two grade levels ahead. Leo’s still struggling with his multiplication facts. I can’t help but wonder if all this block building and drawing is just… time we could be using better.
I get that impulse. Six months earlier, I’d had the exact same panic about my own 10 year old, Jax. I’d signed him up for a summer introductory coding camp, the kind that promises to get kids comfortable with programming early. Jax looked at the first week’s assignments, said “that’s boring,” and dragged every cardboard box we’d accumulated from moving into our garage. For three weeks, he spent every afternoon there, cutting, taping, rearranging. I’d peek in, see him covered in packing tape residue, staring at a lopsided tower, and think this is a $190 waste of summer. I’d signed him up for something productive, and he’d chosen to mess around instead.
I told Leo’s mom to let me share what I saw Leo do with that “wasted” time just last week. He spent four straight days building a marble run out of cereal boxes and old wrapping paper tubes. First try, the marbles stopped halfway down the middle slope because the angle was too flat. He huffed, crumpled a piece of scrap paper, and came over to ask me to fix it. I told him I was busy helping another group with reading, and asked what he thought he could change. He went back, stared at it for two minutes, then asked Mia at his table to help. Together they propped the middle section up with three extra erasers, cut a new edge to keep the marbles from rolling off the side, and tested it 11 times before it worked from start to finish. When the first marble hit the paper cup at the bottom, the whole table cheered.
A lot of the time, we only count learning as something that ends with a grade or a completed worksheet. If it doesn’t have a right answer or a test score tied to it, we write it off as wasted. But what Leo did that week? He practiced problem solving. He asked for help when he needed it, he collaborated, he adjusted his plan when it didn’t work. Those are skills he’ll use far more often than he’ll need to rattle off multiplication facts from memory, even if multiplication facts still matter.
I don’t tell parents to yank all their kid’s structured activities or stop caring about grades. That’s not realistic, and most of the time those activities are good for kids. What I do suggest is three small, low-effort changes to try if you’re staring at your kid’s unplanned time wondering if it’s going to waste. First, instead of asking “what did you learn today?” when they get home from school, ask “what’s something you tried that didn’t work at first?” You’ll be surprised how often the answer is about their block castle, or their drawing, or the bike trick they’ve been practicing, not the worksheet they completed that morning. Second, if your kid is focused on something that isn’t homework or a scheduled activity, don’t interrupt them to “get something productive done” unless you’re already 10 minutes late to leave the house. I’ve stopped asking Jax to turn off whatever random project he’s working on to practice piano 15 minutes earlier than we need to. It doesn’t hurt anything to let that focus run its course. Third, if you’re really worried, cut one low-stakes structured activity a semester. That could be the extra tutoring you signed up for that he hates, or the art class he only goes to because you thought he should. Add that 90 minutes back to his week as unplanned time, and see what he does with it.
After three weeks of working in the garage, Jax’s cardboard castle was done. It had two uneven towers, a working drawbridge, and a whole backstory for the royal family that lived there, which he wrote out in messy pencil on loose notebook paper. I realized he’d measured every wall to make sure the towers were roughly the same height (that’s math he didn’t even know he was doing) and figured out how to tie the drawbridge so it would actually open and close (that’s basic engineering he didn’t learn from a worksheet). A month after he finished the castle, he came to me and said he wanted to do the coding camp homework after all, because he wanted to make a video game set in the castle. That three weeks of what looked like wasted time got him interested in coding more than any assigned homework ever could.
A few weeks after Leo’s conference, his mom sent me a quick email. She said she’d stopped making him do 20 minutes of extra multiplication worksheets on Saturday mornings, and let him use that time to build whatever he wanted. Two weekends ago, he built a rubber band powered car that went all the way across their living room. He asked her to help him look up why thick rubber bands worked better than thin ones, and they checked out a kids’ book about machines from the library that he’s still reading. She said she still worries sometimes. When she sees other parents posting about their kids’ standardized test scores on Facebook, she still wonders if she’s doing the right thing. But she doesn’t think that 45 minutes a day is a waste anymore.
I still have those days too. Last week, Jax got home from school, pulled up TikTok, and spent three hours watching teen skaters trip and land tricks. I stood in the hallway, ready to tell him to turn it off and start his history homework, and then I remembered the castle. An hour later, he went outside, grabbed his old skateboard, and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to land an ollie in the driveway. He fell three times, scraped his knee, and kept going. I don’t know if that three hours of watching videos will show up on his next report card. I don’t know if it’ll help him get into college someday. But I also don’t think it’s a waste of time. Some of the best learning just looks like messing around, until it isn’t.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is Unstructured Play A Waste Of Time