In PHQP 0010_The Benefits Of Mixed-Age Groups, Jeff champions the developmental perks of diverse age play. In this Playvolution HQ Podcast episode, we discuss classic kid games, explore how mixed-age groups boost learning and calm chaos, touch on Vygotsky’s ZPD and MKO, and dig into jungle gym history.

Watch Now: PHQP_0010 The Benefits Of Mixed-Age Groups

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ Podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for for pushing play.

On with the show. So, first up, the face slap game. I saw this at a bus stop the other day while I was out walking my pup Gigi in the morning.

A couple boys, 8, 10, 11, 12 years old, are standing around. There’s three of them. They’re playing the face slap game, which is, basically, here’s how you play.

You take turns slapping your buddy in the face. And the slapper is trying to, you know, make it hurt when they slap their buddy in the face. And the slapee, in receiving the slap, is trying to be stoic and suck it up.

And the way this game goes is you just take turns slapping each other in the face, and it hurts. And, for some reason, it’s fun when you’re a boy of that age. I was happy to see this game being played in 2025 because I played it hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles away decades earlier in the 70s and 80s.

So, this is kind of a pervasive thing. This is something little boys do when they get together. And it’s a game.

It’s play because it’s self-chosen. It’s self-selected. If it was somebody just walking up and slapping somebody, it would be a violent act.

But because these dudes chose to engage in this activity, hey, guys, let’s slap each other. There’s that consent there, which makes it a playful act. So that, again, there’s that playful aggression that we’ve talked about in past episodes.

And speaking of play and children’s games, that kind of leads us into topic one for this episode, almost if it was planned that way. Topic one is classic kids’ games. So on the Playvolution HQ website, years ago, I started a little corner of the site to collect these kinds of classic kids’ games.

And I got some of them up there, and then I got distracted by other things with the site. But now I’m getting back to adding these. And probably for that couple of years, I’m going to be adding a couple a week, probably, and then revamping the ones that have been there before.

So I’ve added the face slap game to the list. The other day, I was out, and I saw a couple of kids playing what we used to call bat-back. A kid on each end of a field has got a baseball bat, and they’re just taking turns batting the ball back to each other.

Not a game that adults would probably organize, but it’s something kids do. Also, recently, we saw kids playing a game called, we used to call it freeze. And one kid, usually a younger kid, was in charge.

And every time they yelled, freeze, the older kids had to stop whatever they were doing. They had to just freeze there until they were unfrozen. And so there’s like this 6-year-old, and she’s commanding probably an 11-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl.

And the boy’s bouncing his basketball. And as soon as she yells, freeze, he has to freeze in mid-dribble. And then the ball kind of stops and rolls away.

And she giggles gloriously. And he’s trying to keep from smirking because he made this little kid laugh playing this silly game. So anyway, we’re collecting these classic playground games.

You know, kickball, dodgeball, all those kind of things. Cat’s Cradle, the yardy things. And right now I’ve got a list of, there’s going to be probably 150 of them right now when it’s finally done.

Maybe, probably more. And then I decided, okay, we need to collect the choosing games, the games and techniques kids use for picking who’s going to be it. And I got started on that.

And I think there’s like 45 of those different strategies, different games, different songs, different chants that kids would use for just picking who was going to be it or team captain or whatever in-game. So that’s going to be another big project on the Playvolution HQ site. So check it out.

And topic two, core values, part 10. Only two more of these left. And this time we’re talking about mixed age groups are beneficial.

And so this is kind of another one of those core values we’re going to add to that list. Got a couple slides here about this. One is same age groups limit growth.

And we see this in early learning programs a lot when everybody has a birthday within a few months of each other. There’s not a whole lot of diversity. It’s a kind of a homogenous group.

And so they don’t challenge each other because they’re all kind of on the same developmental level. And that kind of hinders things because we have a mixed age group. Younger kids are learning from the older kids and older kids.

It sounds weird, but they’re actually learning some things from the younger kids, especially social, emotional things. And we find out you have more growth and development going on when we have mixed age groups. Another big one is the same age groups are more chaotic.

And I’m saying chaotic in terms of probably things that would be labeled behavior problems. A lot of early learning programs, for example, have problems with biting because they put all the children at the developmental stage where they bite in the same room. You’ve got that toddler room where everybody is the same age and everybody goes through that stage of biting around that age.

And so it’s going to be more chaotic. With a mixed age group, you’ve got fewer kids that are in that stage. And so it’s going to be less intense.

Biting is a good example, but there are other stages kids go through that when a whole group of 8 or 10 or 12 of them are going through that stage at roughly the same time, it makes it kind of challenging for the caregivers. And so you kind of lose that as things get spread out a little bit with mixed age grouping. And that makes life a little bit easier for the kids and the adults involved because the diversity of those mixed ages fuels the learning.

And if you want to, I’ve got links in, of course, the episode notes or some links to more on this topic. Some Lilly and Kat stuff specifically because she did a lot of researching and talking about this topic. And the learning happens in both directions.

And so younger kids will be watching the older ones and learn things. Maybe it’s physical skills. Maybe it’s how to draw a star or how to mix colors of Play-Doh.

But the older ones are also learning from the younger ones. They’re learning things like patience and resilience because maybe the little ones are a little bit annoying when you’re trying to do something. And you’ve got to learn how to navigate that.

But that’s valuable learning because it translates out into the real world. And those kids develop skills they’re going to take with them for the rest of their lives. It also gives that mixed age group also, what this all boils down to, I think, is it gives a chance for more of Vygotsky’s ZPD, Zone of Proximal Development, because kids are going to be in a group that has a kind of, it’s more likely they’re going to be at somebody who’s just a touch ahead of them developmentally, which makes that person, an MKO, a more knowledgeable other.

And you don’t have that as much in homogenous groups where everybody is the same age. And I believe in the episode notes, I’ve got some links to some Vygotsky’s ZPD and MKO stuff there. So anyway, that’s that.

Mixed age groups are good for kids and adults. And look, there’s lots of research that supports this. The problem is there aren’t a lot of early learning programs that embrace it.

It happens naturally in family child care programs. There are some family child care programs that that choose to only work with one age group. I’ve known family child cares that were only school agers and only three to five year olds preschoolers and then only infants and toddlers.

And so you can do that. But most family child cares have that natural age range of birth to three years old. And a lot of center based programs and preschool programs don’t.

You’re a baby in this room and you’re a toddler in this room. And then you go to three old room and so on and so on and so on until you until you age out of the program. Every time you have a birthday, you’re shoved into a new room.

You don’t have that that multi age mix that’s so beneficial. Moving on. Topic number three.

Jungle gym history. I wanted to dig in. So, you know, jumbled jungle gyms, little kind of little cubey things that kids crawl up and around.

The jungle gym I grew up with on my on my kindergarten playground. Kindergarten, I think first graders had a separate playground. We had one of these jungle gyms and you climb up.

We probably got up there 10, 12 foot in the air and we climb up on the top. It was all metal and it was on grass. But the grass, I mean, the normal grass had been taken over by this grass that had the little burry things.

So if you fell on the on the jungle gym, you ended up covered in in burrs, which was, I mean, it was incentive not to fall, I guess. But anyway, I love that jungle gym. Some days it was a spaceship.

Some days it was something to play tag on. Other days it was just fun to go sit up there and enjoy the time away from the hectic classroom. When we were we were in in kindergarten for about three hours a day.

It was good to get that that time out of the classroom before we had to go back and play with the blocks. It was such a different world. Anyway, the jungle gym was invented in the 1800s, late 1800s, by a guy named Charles Howard.

And by invented, he was a mathematician and he built these things for, I think, his three three kids to crawl on. And it was made out of bamboo. And he was he was really interested in geometry.

And and basically the jumble jumble gym he built for them was a chance for his kids to get into this three dimensional structure. And that’s what he came up with and and and built for his kids. So that’s that’s the that’s the first invention of the game.

But later. Oh, OK. So he built it for his kids.

It was made of bamboo. I covered those. I guess I forgot I had the slide there.

Look, I make the slides and I got to remember what’s on them. It’s very difficult to make a podcast. Anyway, his son, Sebastian, named, improved and patented the jungle gym idea in the 20s.

And so what he did, he came up with the name Jungle Gym and he made some improvements. What he came up with was was the connectors, I believe, for the way the the pipes, because they’re going to be made of metal instead of bamboo in his designs, were were designed. And so these things could be put together in different ways to build, build these these geometric shapes out of pipe.

And so he came up with the fittings, the names and and patented that ideas in the 20s. He was he was a lawyer in Chicago, I believe. And and that’s really the basis for all the jungle gyms that that came after, including the one that I played on in kindergarten.

Largest jungle gym ever. Sixty five foot tall. Believe it was built in in China in 2012 or something like that for an a playground exhibition.

And so this thing was it was built and used and then and then taken down after after after a while. And it’s it’s gone for now. So that’s that’s that’s a brief history of the jungle gym.

So these things are all over the place. Back in back in my day, they were the kindergarten one was on grass, but a lot of them in the early days were put on like asphalt and concrete covered playgrounds. So a lot of injuries they’ve evolved over the over the years.

And maybe you don’t see the old school ones around so much. But that whole thing for kids to climb on idea kind of grows from from the jungle gym, because I guess before that we were climbing, climbing trees, I guess. So it’s glad that glad that that Charles and Sebastian came up with that idea and put it out there into the world for us.

Thanks, guys. Wrapping the show up for this week. What have we got? One, send me your games.

If there are kids games you remember playing when you were a young human and are fond of, even if you don’t remember the rules completely. I’d love to hear because one of the things I want to eventually add to these write ups I’m doing about the games and and these write ups, this collection I’m building. We’re going to have instructions on how to play the game, a little bit of history on the game, equipment needed, tips and all those kind of things.

And one thing I’d like to be able to include in there is people’s personal stories of of games that they played back in the day in the neighborhood with their buds. Because I think that that becomes called a cultural resource as well. And then it won’t just be my memories.

So if you have games or game memories, please hit me up and and send them my way. There’s contact information in the episode notes. Also, HQ on X. I mentioned a while back that we might be putting together a social media presence for the Playvolution HQ on the X platform.

And I guess that’s going to happen. An account has been created. There aren’t any posts at the moment.

There’s not a link on the Playvolution HQ site yet. But all that stuff is is heading your way in the future. If you’re so inclined to to pay attention to it at the moment.

I’m just planning on sharing stuff from the HQ site there. I don’t know how much socialing I’m going to do on the social networking. But see, you could probably share your game ideas there because I’ll probably be asking for them there as well.

So that that covers that Amazon idea of the week. And look, this is a great way to support support the Playvolution HQ site. And this podcast is shopping on my Amazon.

Amazon portal link is in the show notes. You can check that out this week. What we’ve got is this great book, Schemas, a practical handbook by Laura England.

And so this is a kind of not a very long book paperback. I got the Kindle version. It’s great.

But it really goes into into what schemas are and a handful of play schemas and ideas for supporting them in early learning programs. There aren’t really a lot of books out on this topic. But of what what’s out there, what I’ve been able to find, this is one that is probably worth a little bit of attention.

If it’s a topic you’re interested in. Plus, there’s we’ll get into schemas more schemas and schema play more on this show. And there are some resources I’ve built over on the Playvolution HQ site.

If you want to dig deeper into into them. But that’s the Amazon idea for the week. Again, share the show, share the website, playvolutionhq.com. There’s content there or here on the show that you find that you like share with somebody.

It’s it’s appreciated and it helps grow the the show and the site and and and spread hopefully helpful information. Next week, we’re going to dig into a trash bag stem play scenario. I observed a little bit ago, which I think is pretty cool.

And finally, we’re going to wrap up with a dad joke of the week. I know you’ve been hanging on your hanging on your earbuds waiting to hear what this is. So dad joke of the week.

Why don’t scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything. Get it. Everything’s made up of atoms.

This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for listening. Back soon. Bye bye.

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