Children’s Ways of Knowing A key characteristic of play is that it is self-initiated and internally and intrinsically motivated. The purpose of this paper is to explore theories and practices that support opportunities for children to engage in self-initiated, autonomous, and intrinsically motivated play both at school and at home. I examine these ideas through the lens of what has been referred to as “children’s ways of knowing” (Ramsey, 2011). These ways of knowing are unique to children and often go unnoticed, unheard, and unobserved by adults. It is not enough to simply state that children’s play is self-initiated and internally and intrinsically motivated; it is necessary to push further and think about both what play behavior illuminates about children’s ways of knowing the world and also how in the context of play these children’s epistemologies can be understood and interrogated. The idea of children’s ways of knowing goes beyond the idea of developmental stages as described by Piaget (1962). This concept also is not a mere consideration of differences in children’s ways of learning. The framework of children’s ways of knowing encompasses the idea that children know the world, encounter the world, experience the world, and make sense of the world differently from adults. This moves further than simply thinking about how children learn, or how children interact with each other and with adults. Children have ways of being and existing in the universe that are fundamentally different from adult ways of being in the world.