An initiative of Jasper County Schools
If you peel back the layers of most mannerisms, activities, and customs, you’ll discover it’s actually play. It may be play with serious stakes, but it’s play, nonetheless. Because of this inherent draw for us to “play” in our interactions with each other, whether young or old, Pre-K Teacher Jamie Sandschafer tries to distinguish the importance of proper play among her kiddos. Now in her 18th year at Jasper, she claims that play is all she knows.
Jamie
Sandschafer
The Purpose of Play is to Play With Purpose
By Nate Fisher
“I don’t know if I would do very well in an upper grade, you actually have to do book learning,” she jokes, but her intelligence on the nature of play in her two classes of twenty students apiece is intuitive. At the beginning of a Pre-K session, she says she spends time observing: Who naturally knows how to play? Who still needs to have the first idea? “Some of them don’t know how to play, some of them still don’t know how to play,” she explains, “so that’s our job to teach them that.”
Some of them don’t know how to play, some of them still don’t know how to play,” she explains, “so that’s our job to teach them that.
Jamie highlights that play is vital for the Pre-K age. During the first month, Jamie observes the children and evaluates their particular situation. She learns their interests so she can better relate to them. "They're starting to get my humor now," she observes with a smile, "You just watch them interact, you know, where there are holes, where you need to work on that, who is really well matched to playing together and who is not well matched to playing together… the observation is so authentic."
Roleplay comes in handy when simulating play situations. "They'll do a little bit of roleplay, sometimes of us," she says, "It'd be good or bad, you never know that you're going to get [in terms of] social interaction, you're going to solve social problems, you're going to follow rules."
Jamie wandered into the study of play after graduating with a bachelor's degree in psychology and discovering, "You can't do anything with a bachelor's in Psychology in Illinois." Her dream was to teach high school or college-age Psychology and worked for a time as an aide at an Effingham preschool. "I taught under four different teachers," she says, "I taught every single day of the week and there were four different teachers. Within six months, I'm like, this is exactly what I want to do. I absolutely love it." She followed this up by attending Eastern Illinois University to earn her Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Early Childhood Education. The job at Jasper followed a month later.
If Jamie could talk to her younger self, she'd say try to mine more of the academic resources than the social ones. "Probably just pay more attention, enjoy the academics more," she clarified. She blames the overly social focus on the tendency to take things like safety for granted, something she hopes grows better for her students. "I want all my kids to be happy and safe," she says, imagining the figurative magic wand we've asked her to use for any reason, selfish or selfless. Now Jamie has us thinking about our staple questions: what would you say to your younger self? How would you use a magic wand? Isn’t this play, in the end? Jamie's onto something riveting in her classrooms, and we can't wait for her students to discover the satisfaction of rudimentary play and open the expanse of possibilities it unlocks.
