"The Play's the Thing": Stanford's Bing Nursery School

It is one of the top pre-school programs in the nation, with its highly educated teachers, indoor and outdoor learning spaces, and play-based curriculum. For the toddlers that attend, Bing Nursery School is a place that allows and encourages dramatic play as a means for exploring and learning about their big, wide world. Each classroom is supplied with blocks, clay, paint, sand, and water as the five everyday materials. These materials serve to help children express themselves and develop motor skills, acting as ‘pre-requisites’ to more complex learning. Through the simple act of playing, children learn to enact different social roles, accomplish varied tasks, and resolve conflicts. They come into a world for toddlers, but learn the acts and skills of adults. In a tour of the school, one may see children constructing blocks like engineers, bathing baby dolls like mothers, or measuring water quantities like scientists. But it is this process of learning different roles that makes a child a child. However, recent issues threaten to disrupt the peaceful play zone of these toddlers: “Government initiatives such as “No Child Left Behind” have made grade schools increasingly assessment-focused and pushed academics down into kindergarten. Preschools are now feeling pressured to abandon their play-based curricula for more.” Despite this, the researchers at the school believe that play is the best preparation for later academic success. Play covers physical, emotional, and cognitive development in a social setting – the perfect blend for learning. Thus the Bing Nursery School serves as a model for successful play-based curriculums. As institutions encourage the implementation of more formal, structured learning for toddlers, they may be taking away the means of which children become creative, imaginative, and flexible thinkers.