Serious Play for Serious Times

Abstract A contributing factor to the loss of play in many early childhood classrooms is a sharp separation between literacy learning as serious, even urgent, academic work and play as optional, socially‐beneficial‐at‐best, fun. To recenter play in the academic curriculum, early childhood educators must not only demonstrate how play benefits the existing literacy curriculum (the first half of this article), but we must also recognize play as an important early literacy in its own right with particular relevance for digital literacies (the second half of this article). The following sections review recent literacy research that provides support for recentering play in the early childhood curriculum. This review updates an already well‐established foundation of play‐based literacy research, adding current research that can help teachers integrate literacy play in early childhood settings. The article concludes with a framework for implementing play‐based early literacy in preschool through second grade classrooms.