Improving Children’s Learning Abilities through Play
Treating play as a public policy does not mean treating public policy as a plaything. The goal of this project is to improve parental ties and childrearing styles through play and by improving the abilities and competences of Consejo Nacional de Fomento Educativo (National Council for Education Development, Conafe) instructors. Conafe services Mexico’s most vulnerable population. This program will deploy “Jugando Juntos” (Playing Together), an innovative methodology that will provide a new curriculum and educational materials focused on fostering children’s learning abilities and different types of competences through play. The project shows how the development of small children at large scale can be both creative and fun.
Problematic
Many caregivers lack awareness of the importance that rich playing experiences can have on lasting learning, or of their own crucial role in such experiences. Adults are indeed a key factor both in childrearing and in guiding children’s games to boost their learning skills. In addition, play can transform the way caregivers and children interact, providing opportunities to forge a deeper connection. In Latin America and the Caribbean, different interventions have been implemented with a view to enrich childrearing through play. However, the biggest challenge for the design of public policies is to scale up and integrate this type of successful interventions at national level, ensuring that they have a significant impact on children’s development while at the same time being cost-effective and preserving service quality and their creativity.
Solution
This project adapts a method created by Sesame Workshop to reach out to boys and girls in Mexico’s most marginalized communities through Conafe. The transfer of abilities to Conafe instructors is made through the Family Play Workshops (FPWs) held in marginal urban and rural areas of the Mexican states of Jalisco and Morelos. This innovation also encourages families to play with the materials they have at home, highlights the benefits of games with a strong commitment on the part of the caregiver, and promotes community participation to strengthen teaching through play. The attractive content developed for the program also aims to become available on digital media and mass platforms in order to reach a larger sector of the population.
Evaluation and Impact
The incidence of play on children’s development can have many aspects. For this reason, an implementation monitoring system has been adopted to understand this program’s impact, and an experimental evaluation will be conducted. In it, a control group will receive the same goods and services that Conafe currently offers to families with children in preschool age, whereas in a second group early childhood caregivers will receive the “Jugando Aprendo” (I Learn Playing) program materials. These evaluations will gauge: (i) the program’s impact on the caregivers interactions with children; (ii) the impact of learning on children; (iii) the variances in results obtained in different groups so adjustments can be made possible; (iv) the indirect effects on other theme areas; (v) the perceptions the organizers have of the caregivers’ disposition to change; and (vi) the sustainability of the “Jugando Aprendo” model.