Play is an essential part of childhood, yet play in schools is limited to recreation only after a child has finished a worksheet or an assigned activity. On the playground, free play is vital for physical development and often more acceptable by adults. Research has shown, play is not only good for physical development, it also helps with cognitive and social emotional development as well.
In early childhood education, there is broad recognition that play is fundamental to children’s healthy development. Play experts characterize play by five qualities; it is intrinsically motivated, freely chosen, process over product oriented, nonliteral and enjoyable. Children’s play can also become increasingly complex as children develop. Early forms of play, such as repeatedly lining up cars or carrying blocks back and forth, can evolve into more complex forms of social and symbolic play, including games with rules. Games with rules allow children to participate in shared play but also negotiate, understand and sometimes modify rules and expectations within the play context.
As children learn about their world, play becomes increasingly complex and pretend play is one way children begin to use symbolic representation, important for later abstract thinking. In early childhood environments, children are found playing in the house corner or making cupcakes with clay. This pretend play provides children with opportunities to develop symbolic thinking by using one object to represent another. A block can become a telephone, leaves turn into cereal and chairs and sheets are transformed into homes and offices. In these moments, children are not simply imagining, they are representing something that is not physically present. This capacity to use symbols and representations becomes increasingly important as children encounter more abstract forms of communication, including the symbols and systems that involve literacy and math in later learning.
One of the wonders of play is transformation. When children transform objects, roles and ideas as they play, a familiar experience becomes an entirely new experience. Often, adults are not aware that the transformations children make from an ordinary block to the transformation into a phone in the imagined situations allows children to build theories that they are constructing in their world. They are deciding what an object can represent, what a role means, how people behave and what might happen next. They make assumptions, test them, negotiate with others and revise their thinking as the play unfolds.
When we look closely at play, we see children not merely passing time, but actively making sense of their world. What looks like play is actually children negotiating, theorizing, representing and learning about how the world works. The invitation to adults is to look beyond the play itself and become curious about the thinking that makes the play possible.
In early childhood education, there is broad recognition that play is fundamental to children’s healthy development. Play experts characterize play by five qualities; it is intrinsically motivated, freely chosen, process over product oriented, nonliteral and enjoyable. Children’s play can also become increasingly complex as children develop. Early forms of play, such as repeatedly lining up cars or carrying blocks back and forth, can evolve into more complex forms of social and symbolic play, including games with rules. Games with rules allow children to participate in shared play but also negotiate, understand and sometimes modify rules and expectations within the play context.
As children learn about their world, play becomes increasingly complex and pretend play is one way children begin to use symbolic representation, important for later abstract thinking. In early childhood environments, children are found playing in the house corner or making cupcakes with clay. This pretend play provides children with opportunities to develop symbolic thinking by using one object to represent another. A block can become a telephone, leaves turn into cereal and chairs and sheets are transformed into homes and offices. In these moments, children are not simply imagining, they are representing something that is not physically present. This capacity to use symbols and representations becomes increasingly important as children encounter more abstract forms of communication, including the symbols and systems that involve literacy and math in later learning.
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When we look closely at play, we see children not merely passing time, but actively making sense of their world.
One of the wonders of play is transformation. When children transform objects, roles and ideas as they play, a familiar experience becomes an entirely new experience. Often, adults are not aware that the transformations children make from an ordinary block to the transformation into a phone in the imagined situations allows children to build theories that they are constructing in their world. They are deciding what an object can represent, what a role means, how people behave and what might happen next. They make assumptions, test them, negotiate with others and revise their thinking as the play unfolds.
When we look closely at play, we see children not merely passing time, but actively making sense of their world. What looks like play is actually children negotiating, theorizing, representing and learning about how the world works. The invitation to adults is to look beyond the play itself and become curious about the thinking that makes the play possible.
