The LEGO Foundation and the LEGO Group have joined forces to address the critical needs of children in these unprecedented times including helping parents and teachers around the world, to support children of all ages to naturally learn across the home and school environment.

Based on the extensive knowledge that exists on how children learn through active engaging playful experiences, we have identified eight playful and integrated educational approaches, that will provide a positive impact on students, while they are balancing the home and school life.

These eight pedagogies are based on how children of all ages learn through active hands-on engagement and happen through playful, child-directed activities, with intentional facilitation and a focus on a broader range of learning outcomes, integrated with knowledge and understanding

Active learning
Teaching approaches that cater to children’s’ interests, understanding, and development by engaging them in the learning process rather than letting them passively consuming information. Active learning includes cognitive, emotional, or behavioral activity, and leverages choice to foster student engagement. Studies have shown that active learning fosters an impact on cognitive, social, and emotional development among school-aged children.

Suggestions
Hands-on physical activities and finding time for movement are very effective ways to engage multiple senses. For instance, for young children, one can introduce physical movement and exercise as part of counting and understanding math concepts. Older children can invent a morning workout or be challenged to plan a trip in the neighborhood for a specific distance or a picnic at a new site.
Collaborative and cooperative learning
Cooperative and collaborative learning strategies are designed to emphasize the importance of positive social interactions among learners working with one another, working together, helping each other and contributing to the same task. Positive impact includes a range of learning outcomes including reading, math, communication, and self-efficacy.

Suggestions
Let your children collaborate and do homework together with friends, or invite them to use safe and creative platforms like Scratch or Minecraft to interact online. This allows them to not only engage in creative content but also build on and collaborate with others to engage in problem-solving and computational thinking.
Experiential learning
Experiential learning is theories and practices that value the role of experience in fostering meaningful learning. It was founded on the notion that quality experiences within and beyond the classroom promote meaningful learning. Studies found positive outcomes on mathematics, science, and writing learning outcomes, positive teacher and peer interactions, and increased learner engagement, motivation, and self-efficacy.

Suggestions
Young children can get engaged in preparing snacks or meals, for instance. Or ask them to sort out the fruits, candy, popcorns, etc. and define a system for how one can buy these for the game or movie night. Older children can take existing recipes, change quantities or swap out ingredients according to own ideas.
Guided-Discovery learning
A broad approach to learning where the adult guide, assist and enrich the experience through collaborative, learner-centered activities in which learners play an active part in the process of knowledge discovery or acquisition. Guided discovery learning is to ‘expect and be prepared to discover knowledge’ with the support and scaffolding of a teacher or a parent. Studies found guided discovery learning to be a more effective approach to generating positive learning outcomes for children, particularly for fostering durable science learning, mathematics and thinking skills.

Suggestions
Small science experiments can be done at home like closing your eyes and guessing the taste of foods, or starting your little garden in the windowsill. You can also take an existing piece of music and experiment with how sounds that can be generated from the objects you have available in the house
Inquiry-based learning
Inquiry-based learning is a child-centered approach to teaching and learning where a unit of work is organized around relevant, authentic, open-ended questions. It is a great way to develop scientific skills, mathematics, as well as strong engagement and motivation for learning.

Suggestion
With younger children, ask open-ended questions like how do we turn this corner of the house into a learning space? What choices to be made regarding design and functionality?
Older children can engage in more difficult questions like, how will the COVID-19 impact climate change? Trying to investigate what the current implications are, and what we learn about addressing climate change?
Problem-based learning
An active learning pedagogy that uses a meaningful problem to let children better grasp the content, develop strategies, and build self-reliance and confidence. Studies have been found to positively support student learning in mathematical problem solving and science learning.

Problem-based learning involves structuring and activity or theme around a problem. As with inquiry and project-based learning, the central question, problem, or project, and its richness as a vehicle to explore concepts and generate new investigative threads, is key.

Suggestions
For young children, very meaningful problems are often how to balance the intake of different kinds of foods, or inviting for new ways to exercise if one needs to stay indoors or at a limited space.
For older children, a process of searching for problems that can be resolved is almost like a challenge in itself; whether it's a technology that doesn't work or can be improved, or finding alternative ways of communicating with friends and family online.
Project-based learning
An active learning pedagogy that involves designing learning around a meaningful project and usually completed collaboratively, with scaffolding provided by parents or teachers to shift more responsibility for the learning process to the child. Project-based learning considers the project as the vehicle for engaging in content and curricula. Studies have found this to foster a range of learning outcomes related to knowledge, skills, motivation, and self-efficacy regarding science, and information literacy skills.

Suggestions
For young children, it's very effective for them to build a physical representation of the particular topic or project they are working on in school, whether it's representing an object for mathematics, a picture book for a language, a puppet show and role-play, etc.
Older children could benefit from clustering activities together and document their day and work on a poster or in an online portfolio to display and present; one can also start by watching a short movie or documentary about a topic and initiate an open-ended explorative project to describe an alternative ending.
Montessori education
An educational approach developed by Maria Montessori, which considers children as active, motivated learners and stresses the links between physical, emotional, social, and cognitive development. The approach is characterized by hands-on experiential learning, group and pair work, self-directed learning with teacher guidance, and lack of competition and extrinsic rewards. Research studies found it effective in generating positive outcomes related to all five domains of cognitive, social, emotional, physical, and creative skills.

Suggestions
For young children, the approach involves children's interest in manipulating and arranging objects and materials in the house, for instance, what are the colors, shapes, and sizes of objects in the kitchen cupboard?
For older children, building more complex projects like building a bridge over the kitchen table, using different materials to engage abstract thinking and creativity to represent activities over the week as a tangible calendar, or develop your own bracelets or jewelry with everyday materials.

These examples are timely and important, as parents and teachers face increasing pressure to collaborate and respond to integrate home activities and school content. They also demonstrate that you don't necessarily need a lot of online learning to engage in quality learning experiences.

The real strengths of all of these approaches are that they integrate theory and practice, and affect student learning across a balance of skills, at the same time as maintaining high student engagement and depth in understanding knowledge and concepts.

If one is able to adjust the timeline over the course of the day, and cluster work in fewer but slightly longer sessions, then it also supports the individual pace of students.

The role of parents and teachers is to act as 'guides' throughout the learning process. They have a particular goal and destination in mind, ensure the child has access to relevant materials and experiences, and children make choices about the process and approach to get to the goals.

The effectiveness of these approaches is due to the alignment with the science of how children naturally learn through play when children are actively engaged in personally meaningful experiences they enjoy and are enabled to test and try out things in collaboration with others.

A range of open-ended physical and digital materials benefit these approaches; for instance, LEGO materials can be used as an effective tool for hands-on learning across all of these pedagogies, by leveraging the low entry point to build rich, increasingly complex and creative representations of projects and environments, along with enabling co-builds and collaborations across age groups.

It’s an extraordinarily difficult time, but together we can support each other, be inspired, be safe and learn through play.

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Dr. Bo Stjerne Thomsen is the Vice-President and Chair of Learning through Play in the LEGO Foundation. The function of the Chair is to be the expert at the highest level to the executive leadership on how children and adults learn through play.