Keeping play at the centre – using data to make curriculum visible

In early childhood settings, educators often navigate a familiar tension: how to honour children’s play as the foundation of learning while ensuring curriculum expectations are met? In today’s article, early childhood educators Helen Bartlett and Lauren Bastion – from American International School Dhaka in Bangladesh – explore how this challenge sits at the heart of their daily practice. They identify the challenge in documenting the learning taking place and explain how they built a curriculum-tracking platform that analyses children’s learning stories and generates visual curriculum insights.

We are play-based, Reggio-inspired educators working within an inquiry framework. We believe that children’s questions, theories and play should shape the direction of learning, yet we are also responsible for ensuring each child encounters a broad and balanced curriculum.

Like many early childhood educators, we were confident in our pedagogy, our relationships with children, and the richness of their play. What we lacked was visibility. We needed to understand not just what children were doing, but how their play connected to the concepts, skills and dispositions within our curriculum. We wanted this clarity without interrupting play, adding checklists, or shifting toward teacher-directed whole-class teaching.

Over time, it became clear that the challenge was not the learning itself, but the difficulty of seeing the whole picture.

Identifying the need – play is rich but hard to track systematically

Evidence consistently shows that play is one of the most effective ways young children learn. Learning through play supports cognitive development, problem-solving, collaboration, language, creativity and self-regulation, often simultaneously (The LEGO Foundation, 2020). For us, this reaffirmed what we observed daily: children construct meaning most powerfully through hands-on, self-directed activity.

At the same time, we were committed to pedagogical documentation. Influenced by Reggio Emilia, we viewed documentation not as record-keeping but as ‘a way of listening’ and a tool for interpreting children’s thinking (Rinaldi, 2006). Learning stories, in particular, allowed us to capture the nuance, context and voice of children’s learning. Carr and Lee (2012) describe learning stories as a narrative form of assessment that values identity, disposition and learner agency, aligning deeply with our philosophy.

However, as we wrote more stories, another challenge emerged. The richer the documentation became, the harder it was to understand where it sat across the curriculum.

We found ourselves asking:

• Which curriculum areas were children naturally engaging with?
• Were there concepts or skills they had not yet encountered?
• Were some learning areas disproportionately represented because of our own teaching instincts?
• How could we ensure each child had opportunities across the whole program without directing their play?

We needed a way to track curriculum exposure based on what children were already doing, not what we set up for them. No existing tool supported this in a play-based, emergent curriculum context, so we built one.

What we did – a curriculum-tracking platform based on documentation

We used Lovable – an AI-powered platform that allows you to build and develop a site or an app through prompts – to create a private tool that analyses learning stories and generates visual curriculum insights. Helen originally built the first version, before Lauren came on board and together, we added more features and changed the way the data was displayed. It became a collaborative project. 

The process for using the curriculum-tracking platform is straightforward:

1. Teachers write a learning story, either directly in the platform or in our school’s documentation tool. We may use AI to clean grammar or flow, but the story comes entirely from real interactions with children.
2. We enter the story into the analysis tool.
3. The platform identifies curriculum connections, including: concepts, skills, learner dispositions, and standards – in our case, Gold’s continuum (Teaching Strategies, 2021)
4. Teachers tag the children involved.
5. The platform generates 3 possible lines of inquiry based on the story. These are not prescriptive; they simply reflect potential directions that emerged from the children’s play.

The most important principle is that the AI cannot invent anything, it can only analyse what teachers observed. The teacher remains the sense-maker, interpreter and professional decision-maker.

The impact – seeing the curriculum through the lens of play

The curriculum-tracking platform now gives us 2 levels of insight: individual and whole-class patterns.

Individual insights

For each child, we can see:

• How often have they encountered particular concepts or skills
• Which curriculum areas appear frequently in their stories
• Which areas appear less often
• Patterns across time

Crucially, we are not looking for mastery. As Carr and Lee (2012) emphasise, early learning is non-linear and identity driven. We are looking for opportunities and exposure for the curriculum experiences children have had through play.

Whole-class insights

We can zoom out to understand:

• Which areas of the curriculum are the class naturally drawn to
• Which skills or dispositions dominate our documentation
• What might be missing or underrepresented
• Where we may wish to listen differently or scaffold more intentionally

For example, we discovered that our documentation heavily emphasised thinking skills and scientific inquiry. This aligned with our observations, but we also noticed that communication skills and specific social-emotional indicators were less visible. This prompted us to reflect on our language, what we chose to document, and how we interpreted group play.

These insights align with the literature: documentation is not just a record, but a mirror for educators, revealing patterns in our own practice and prompting professional growth (Rinaldi, 2006). The curriculum-tracking platform did not give us answers. Instead, it sharpened our questions.

Acting on the insights – strengthening in-the-moment planning

We are a team of 2 teachers and 3 teaching assistants and we all contribute to the platform. We all meet once a week as part of our planning process and the data on the platform is at the centre of the planning process for all of us.

Because our team works responsively rather than through predetermined lesson plans, we’ve found that the data help us make better in-the-moment decisions. Instead of planning activities to target missing curriculum areas, we use the insights to:

• Adjust the language we use with children
• Pose different questions
• Notice opportunities we may have overlooked
• Collaborate as a team to support children in authentic ways.

This approach reflects the ‘notice–recognise–respond’ cycle central to learning stories (Carr & Lee, 2012). It keeps play at the centre while ensuring breadth in the curriculum.

We recently adopted the ‘What? So what? Now what?’ reflection routine to guide our team discussions. This structure helps us interpret patterns rather than react to them, ensuring our responses remain relational, contextual and grounded in children’s interests.

What this means for educators beyond our school

Although our tool is private and built for our own context, the process behind it may be helpful to others. We have learned it is best to:

• Start with documentation that reflects children’s real experiences
• Use the documentation to make curriculum visible, not to drive curriculum at children
• Allow evidence to refine teacher decisions, not replace them
• Trust that play generates more curriculum coverage than we often assume

The LEGO Foundation (2020) reminds us that play is intellectually rigorous and deeply connected to holistic development. Our experience supports this. The data show that children’s play was already engaging with the curriculum in rich and unexpected ways – we simply needed a better way to see it.

We did not set out to create a technological solution. We set out to understand how to keep play authentic while meeting curriculum expectations. Since introducing the platform 5 months ago, it has become not a planner but a lens – a way of seeing the learning already unfolding in front of us.

It allows us to trust play more deeply, and it strengthens our professional judgement.
Over time, this has led to richer follow-up conversations, more sustained inquiry, and ensured that curriculum visibility never comes at the expense of children’s ideas.

For us, this balance between curriculum clarity and the integrity of play has become the core of our pedagogy.

References and further reading

Carr, M., & Lee, W. (2012). Learning stories: Constructing learner identities in early education. SAGE. 

Edwards, C., Gandini, L., & Forman, G. (Eds.). (1998). The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia approach—Advanced reflections (2nd ed.). Ablex. 

LEGO Foundation. (2020). Learning through play: A review of the evidence. 

Rinaldi, C. (2006). In dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, researching and learning. Routledge. 

Teaching Strategies. (2021). The Creative Curriculum for preschool, sixth edition: The developmental continuum for ages 3–5.