BY BONNIE LAXTON-BLINKHORN, KINDICARE

NOVEMBER 22, 2022

Play based learning is a pillar of all approaches to early education, none more so than Anji Play, which places a child’s right to extended periods of uninterrupted play at its heart.

Anji Play is a philosophical approach to early learning developed by Ms Cheng Xueqin for the 130 publicly funded kindergarten programs she is responsible for in Anji County, in China’s Zhejiang Province.

In developing Anji Play, Ms Cheng was greatly influenced by China’s 1989 decision to sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which enshrines the rights of children to engage in play. 

Anji Play evolved from Ms Cheng’s commitment to transforming early learning from a teacher-led approach to a child-led approach with a strong emphasis on self-determination and a child’s right to extended period of uninterrupted play-based discovery.

The principles of Anji Play

Anji Play is based on the five interconnected principles of love, risk, joy, engagement and reflection, as well as a fundamental belief in the ability of the child.

Love: The feeling of safety that comes from responsive, reliable, and consistent environments and relationships. The experience of being trusted, heard, seen, and respected.

Risk: The experience of doing something with uncertain outcomes based on a prediction. Risk is the basis of inquiry, learning, discovery, and the scientific method.

Joy: The internal reward that comes from experiences of risk, deep engagement, and discovery. The presence of joy is the clearest measure of quality in early childhood programs.

Engagement: A sense of connection and purpose that arises from exploration and discovery of the physical and social worlds. 

Reflection: The process of thinking about, interpreting, and understanding experiences and information.

Guided by an understanding of these principles, Anji Play educators create safe responsive play environments that meet every child’s need for uninterrupted, and unguided true play.

Anji Play spokesperson, Jesse Coffino says self-determined or ‘true play’ in Anji “takes place in an ecology that supports deeps reflection and self-expression and connects children, families and the communities they occupy and create.”

Educators are asked to step back and observe with their “hands down, mouths closed, ears, eyes, and heart open,” responding, only as necessary, to ensure safety.

In videos of children engaged in Anji Play, educators are typically off to the side of the action, observing and recording the children. These recordings are used later to reflect on the play and to initiate discussions with children about challenges and decision making.

In a recent interview Ms Cheng said the most important role of the educator in Anji Play is to support the fullest expression of a child’s right to play.

“First the teacher creates an environment that embodies a sense of safety so that a child engages with their full mind and body.

“The teacher must also provide rich materials and an open and varied environment that engages a child in complex learning and that a child can explore in a self-determined fashion,” she said. 

Environments and materials

To this end Anji Play settings favour simple, low cost, open-ended materials of all shapes and sizes, most of which are drawn from daily life.

Ms Cheng designed a range of materials for the program including blocks, planks, ladders, barrels, mats, carts, climbing cubes, and storage systems, and the size and variety of these invites children to engage in large-scale construction, design, combination, recombination, revision, imagination, and self-expression.

Outdoor environments are planned to maximise each child’s opportunity for imagination, inquiry, and contact with natural phenomena and elements.

Water, sand, mud, trees, bamboo, ditches, tunnels, and hills are just some of the features available to engage children in exploration, discovery, risk-taking, problem solving, and knowledge creation.

Proponents of Anji Play say the design and arrangement of indoor, outdoor, and in-between spaces enables children to play; organise and manage their materials; move freely; complete daily routines independently; describe, express, and document their experiences and observations, and see these expressions presented in the classroom.

“The classroom should be the outdoors in miniature. The outdoors should be the classroom magnified,” says Ms Cheng.

Regardless of the weather, children in Anji programs have a minimum of two hours outdoor play every morning and this is based on Ms Cheng’s observation that more time leads to more complex play and more focus among children, as well as a greater opportunity to fully engage in projects and activities.

“...with two hours and a range of open-ended materials, children will organise and create highly complex physical structures that allow them to engage in physical and mental risk, and develop rules to govern their use,” says Jesse Coffino.

Reflections on play

A shared reflection time following outdoor play is a scheduled part of every Anji day.

This session is guided and supported by educators and provides children with a chance to record and reflect on their experiences in the morning through talking and drawing pictures.

Children are encouraged to discuss any challenges they faced and describe their observations and learnings.

They are then provided with a variety of materials to document their experiences, they might choose to dictate their experience to an educator, draw a picture, or write about their own story as they start to experiment with writing Chinese characters.

Proponents of Anji Play say this opportunity for reflection is what transforms a child’s experiences into knowledge.

Anji Play spokesperson Jesse Coffino says these reflections also provide a rich record of each child’s experiences and accumulated knowledge.

Support for the Anji Play approach is growing among Chinese Educators, and the Ministry of Education, and in 2014 the President of China awarded founder Ms Cheng the country’s highest honour for early childhood education.

While Anji Play programs aren’t yet widely available in Australia, pilot programs are underway in Europe, Africa and the Unites States. 

Learn more about AnjiPlay here.