Play Study

Teachers at three public schools are looking at how play can improve young students ability to learn.

The Rainy River District School Board's Speech Pathologist Ann Anderson says it's a year-long research project involving some junior and senior kindergarten and grade one students, but teachers are already seeing results.

"There's greater opportunities to observe students strengths as independent learners and problem solvers," says Anderson. "They certainly are more engaged in the learning tasks and there's more peer interaction and learning from each other which they found very powerful and they always didn't see before."

Junior kindergarten students at Atikokan's North Star Community School, SK students at J-W Walker and a grade one class at Robert Moore are involved.

Planning is already underway to involve other primary classes next year.