How to Create More Opportunities for Open-Ended Play at Recess

When you ask a school-aged child what the most important part of their school day is, you will almost always get the same response: recess. While many of us in education put lots of thought and energy into designing engaging learning tasks in our classrooms, it is those 10-to-15-minute-long sections of the day outside the classroom that matter most to our students. 

The central importance of recess to students should come as no surprise to us, of course. Students spend a lot of time on the schoolyard. When you add up all of their recesses and lunches, students will have spent the equivalent of one full school year on the yard by the time they graduate from eighth grade.

Despite this, schools don’t often spend much time thinking intentionally about recess. Additionally, even schools that do provide some options for recess typically tend to focus on more traditional offerings like soccer or basketball, as opposed to open-ended play.

A cooperative approach to recess

Recess can be a mixed bag for students. For some it is the source of various highs: scoring a goal or an exciting game of hide-and-seek. But for others it is the source of lows that come from being bullied or left out. Additionally, most schools provide students with a list of what not to do but offer no real guidance or opportunities to use recess time in a way that will add to students’ well-being and development.

Consequently, on many schoolyards, recess is a time for the more dominant, sporty students to engage in mostly one-sided competitive play against the less athletic students. Social hierarchies that already exist in the classroom are simply reinforced out on the yard, and many of the ensuing dramas follow students back into the school once the bell rings.

Educators who want to disrupt this dynamic need only observe their own students to see what sorts of recess activities might result in a more cooperative and less competitive recess experience. Even with relatively few materials or equipment, students will engage in a number of different play types at recess, including imaginative play, rough-and-tumble play, tag and running games, climbing, digging, and fort or den making. How many of these options do your students have at present? A school that wants to center student voice might very well start with this question and then work to provide more varied play opportunities.

Recess improvements to consider

If you follow your students’ lead, improving their experiences outside doesn’t have to cost a great deal of time or money. Here are some of my favorite recess improvements:

• Purchase a “jobsite” radio for students to take outside at recess and have dance parties.
• Add extra-tough (kidproof) gardening wagons to the yard. Classes can take turns being the “wagon patrol” and be in charge of putting them out each day.
• Provide chalk to students, and invite them to beautify a certain section of the schoolyard.
• Allow tree climbing, where safe.
• Provide plastic shovels for mud play in spring and snow play in winter.
• Provide buckets and PVC pipes for rainy-day play.
• Disassemble old furniture and allow the students to use the pieces of wood in their own creations.
• Create a digging section of your schoolyard.
• Explore implementing a loose parts play program.
• Hang tarps from eyelets on the outside wall of the school. These become forts, pirate ships, and other bases for students to hide in.
• Teach students about consent, and then allow wrestling or play fighting.
• Consider banning indoor recess (“We play in all weather!”).
• Invite parents to drop off used Christmas trees on the yard in January. Students can use these as beds or as fort-building materials and then enjoy “replanting” them in the spring mud.

Creating a culture for open-ended outdoor play

I should note that the changes I have listed above are only possible in a school where the staff, parents, and principal all share a common passion for open-ended outdoor play. As a principal myself, I didn’t implement all of the above at the same time, and certainly not before building local consensus around the importance of providing rich opportunities for developmentally appropriate play. I had multiple starting points for building support for open-ended play, including sharing research and my own learning at staff meetings and parent council meetings, conducting student surveys, and publicizing the benefits of open-ended play in my newsletters and bulletin board displays.

I also modeled the interactions that I wanted to see on the yard: I went out and pulled students in wagons at recess, I helped them build their shelters and forts, and I even climbed a few trees. For me as the lead learner in the building, engaging in healthy, developmentally important outdoor play with the students was an essential step in giving my staff and students the explicit permission to take a few risks, get a little dirty on occasion, and embrace the many benefits of an open-ended recess program.

Educators who want to begin learning about this work can start by reaching out to their own early years departments, outdoor education departments, or physical education departments to learn about other schools or initiatives that support healthy open-ended play in schools. You may also want to connect with groups like Take Me Outside or Jonathan Haidt’s Let Grow, both of which help schools to promote student agency, outdoor learning, and healthy recess times.

Most important, though, I would encourage educators to think like a child when making decisions about recess. Far too often in education, we make decisions that work best for adults, under the premise of doing what is best for kids. In practice, however, we often force children to conform to a set of rules and behaviors that make sense to us adults. In so doing, we give children the message that there is something wrong with them. The truth is that the natural, self-selected play activities of children should serve as guideposts and indicators for those of us in positions of authority. If we simply follow children’s lead, recess can be a collaborative and creative time of day that enriches your school culture and fulfills your students’ many developmental needs.