PLAY

Chapter 7: Pages 214-232

PLAY

- Play is both common and complex and continues to provide common ground for informal social exchange as children mature.

- Therefore adults who guide the social development of children need to understand the nature and function of play.

THE NATURE OF PLAY

- Play, although not easily defined, has certain definitive characteristics.

- Enjoyable

- Actively Engaging

- Intrinsically Motivated: it is essentially and unproductive activity in which the process is more important than the ends.

- Voluntary

- Non-literal: does not "count" from a child's perspective.

- Play is determined as play by the players, this means that the player may begin, end, or alter the activity in progress without consulting anyone but the other players.

Genetic Foundations

- Play is a species behavior. All primates including humans play. Adaptability, behavioral flexibility, and physical fitness have had great survival value for humans and are practices and enhanced through play.

- The opposite of play is reality or seriousness, not work.

Cognition

- Children tend to play in ways that are consistent with their cognitive development.

- Toddlers delight in sensory activity and toys that makes noise as a result of their activity.

- Three-seven year olds test their understanding of the social world through pretend play.

- A wide variety of cognitive skills are enhanced by play during the preschool years such as measurement, equivalency, balance, spatial concepts, conversation, decentration, reversibility, memory, and logical classification, mental representations, and creativity.

- Play is also the context for learning about interpersonal relationships among the children.

- Play facilitates cognitive decentering, or the ability to take another's point of view or coordinate one's own understand with those others.

See Figure 7-1 The integrative function of play.

Language

- Children play with sounds and make up words, imitate adults or other children in amusing voices, and repeat their own statements with rhythm and rhyme.Perceptual-Motor Development

- The fundamental motor skills such as running, throwing, and catching, climbing, dodging, kicking, and striking are usually acquired before the age of 8 and are eventually combined in games.

- Success in physical play develops increased confidence, emotional stability, independence, and self-control in older children. Vigorous physical play also serves to reduce stress engendered in other aspects of life in a socially acceptable way.Emotional Development

- Children who play are happier than those who don't and children that are fun to be with are the preferred playmates.

- Children's role selection displays their concerns with nurture/provider, and good/evil etc.

- Play supports emotional growth as typical children cope with conflicts or demands within the undemanding contexts of play.

- In pretend play, they can enact sorrow, rage, worry, fear, love, and dismay with impunity.

- Children gain a sense of power and control when they manipulate objects and events to suit themselves.Social Development

- Children enjoy their play and desire to maintain it. With this strong motivation, they learn to become more effective communicators both verbally and nonverbally.

- They demonstrate empathy to other within the roles of pretend play and learn how to display and read others pretend and real emotions.

- They also learn how to negotiate by dealing with rules.Gender Differences in Children's Play

- There are only gender differences when children identify their gender identity.

- The amount of play by boys and girls does not differ, but the style of play and the choices of themes diverge.

- Most boys play more vigorously and range further away from adults than girls

- Girls tend to focus on relationships and social support, demonstrating more nurturing and empathy in their play.

- Media influences teach boys and girls what to play with, i.e. boys play with trucks and girls play with housekeeping toys.

Categories of social participation:

1. Unoccupied Behavior: The child is not engaged in any task or social participation. She or he spends most of the time looking around or wandering around, but is occupied with no specific task.

2. Onlooker: The child watches other children and sometimes talks with them. The child is actively engaged in observing specific activities.

3. Solitary Play: The child plays with toys alone and independently, without interacting with others. Children use their intelligence and problem solving abilities to engage with objects or to pretend alone.

4. Parallel Activity: The child plays independently but the chosen activity brings him or her among other children who are engaged in the same activity. Two children putting puzzles together on the same table is typical of this type of play. Certain levels of maturity are required for both solitary and group play, and most preschool children participate in both types.

5. Associative Play: The child plays with other children and interacts with them around a similar, but not identical activity. For example, Nikkei rides hi struck back and forth near a block construction where Dennis and Mark are working together. Occasionally he stops to comment and then continues his "deliveries".

6. Cooperative or Organized Supplementary Play: The child plays in a group that is organized to make some material product or to strive for some common goal. A simple game of ring around the rosy is cooperative play.

- Solitary play is most common amongst toddlers, partly because they cannot interact with their peers.

- Social Status in play refers to who initiates the game and who defines all the rules.

TYPES OF PLAY

Exploratory Behavior

- The manipulation and examination of objects often has been lumped into the category of play.

- Exploratory play generally consists of three general patterns: object procuring, manual investigation, and asking questions.

- The questions being addressed are: What can I do with this? What is the nature of this object or situation?

- Complexity of the objects explored seems to be closely related to the time it takes to manipulate and investigate the object.

- Novelty is also a major factor, with children showing wariness of objects that are too novel.

- Exploration becomes play when the child shifts from the question, What does this object do, to what can I do with this object? Play With Objects

- This section mostly summarizes previous points. Play can take place anywhere with anything.

- The designs of playthings vary from realistic to abstract. Toddlers need realistic materials to pursuer a play theme. They simply do not have enough experience or knowledge of what to do with abstract pieces. However, school age children will play longer and engage in more complex play with abstract toys.

The following list is a sequential summary of the play behaviours that occur as the very young child develops play with objects:

1. Repetitive motor behavior, mouthing.

2. Systematic exploration of objects.

3. Actions begin to be appropriate for objects.

4. Objects that have functional relationships are combined.

5. Actions patterns are combined to form larger sequences (stirring in, pouring from, and washing a bowl)

6. Actions patterns are applied to self e.g. sleeping.

7. Action patterns are applied to others or replicas e.g. dolls eat

8. The ability to act is attributed to replicas e.g. dolls feed teddy bears.

9. Objects that are not present but are needed to complete a logical sequence are "invented" e.g. pretends a spoon to stir with.

10. Objects are transformed for use in sequences e.g. uses pencil for spoon.

- The term "transform," means to substitute one object for another.

- Some children respond to the symbolic potential of objects more readily than others. Their play style has been called the dramatist style. However some children respond to attributes such as colour, text, and shape. These children are patterners.

- The dramatist approaches material and asks, "What story can I tell with this object"?

- The patternist asks, "How can I arrange these things so that they are beautiful"?

- For example, the patternist would poke eyes in her snowman, where the dramatist would just pretend he had eyes.

See Table 7-1 Dramatic Styles of Children in Imaginative Play

Dramatic Play

- Dramatic play or pretend play is the most apparent form of play in young children.

- Socio-dramatic play is where children share goals, a theme, and materials are possible by age 3 if the children have acquired the skills to do so.

- When interrupted from transition in a group setting, the pragmatist simply stops and complies with adult requests while the fantasizer has difficulty leaving the imaginative mode and may ignore the adult.

Object substitution: Children must acquire to substitute an object for another or transform an object into another. Example: one year they might use a wooden object for a horse and a cup for a drinking trough, the next year the cup might been transformed into a container.

Object invention: A child might use a stone as a car, or do a stirring action above a bowl. If children do not learn this they might see toys as being real. For example: a girl walks up to a toy oven and throws her hands in the air because it does not turn on.

Changes of time and place: Pretending a sandbox is a beach. Children learn to transform time and place settings however if they have no knowledge of objects such as spaceships or busses they cannot initiate play situations involving them.

Role-playing: The functional role is where the child simply enacts what a person is doing in a situation. The character role however requires the child to take on behavioral characteristics as well e.g. family roles and fictional roles.

Cultural and experiential differences in children: Children bring into play situations their cultural background and lifestyle as sources of information. Example: a child used an orange as a ball because he had never eaten one. Children from different cultures talk and act differently. Experienced, knowledgeable adults will be able to take these considerations into account when setting up and guiding play in a social environment.

Rules children construct for themselves in social pretend play: Between 2 and 6 years children gradually generate rules to allow them to engage in pretend play in groups. Though 2, 3 year olds do not see the use in rules. Children also need time and opportunity to interact with each other in supportive play settings in order to construct or modify the internal rules of social play.

Peer communication about pretend play, meta-communication: A communication about communications, are either statements or actions that explain messages about how a behavior should be interpreted. They indicate if the behavior should be taken seriously or playfully. Verbal meta-communications often set the scene or conditions for play. Meta-communications explicitly separate the real from the pretend and work frequently to maintain the play.

- Procedural statements, "its my turn"

- Transform settings, "we are lost in the forest now!"

- Terminating statements, "I'm not daddy anymore"

- The play frame encompasses the scope of the play event. To speak outside of this frame sometimes children say "out of frame" and then say something serious that relates to the real world and not the pretend situation. For instance if the child builds a "fire" and then leaves to get "food" he or she is still in the play frame.

Influencing the direction of play: Some children wish to change the pace of the play frame using statements that remain in the play frame.

Ulterior conversations: These might appear to be role enactment but do alter the course of the play. The query, "is it nighttime?" from the "baby" effectively initiates a caregiving sequence from the "mother."

Underscoring: Provides information to other players for example: "I'll get dinner now" spoken in a character voice. Underscoring is also used to "magic" something, for example "grow, grow, and grow, now I am big!"

Storytelling: Frequently is couched in the past tense and often is spoken in cadence. It allows for the developments of more elaborate plots. For example, "lets say the spaceship went up, way up."

Prompting: Is a technique in which one player instructs another on how to act or what to say, often in a stage whisper or a softer voice: I'm ready for breakfast now, (whispering) no, you have to cook the eggs first before I eat.

Formal pretend proposals: "Let's pretend the family goes to the beach" this is common when the play scene is falling apart or when the children are playing with objects because then it has to be mostly narrated.

Role selection: Children successfully take on roles in play. Higher status children call out whom they want to role-play, whereas lower status children must first ask permission.

Combining the pretend play skills: Adding complexity to the play schemes and combining all the pretend play skills children have acquired.

See figure 7-2 Explicit and Implicit Rules

See figure 7-2 Purpose of meta-communications about play with verbal and nonverbal examples:

See figure 7-3 Summary of Strategies children use to redirect play within the play frame:

Construction Play

- Construction play occurs when children make or build something. Solitary, parallel, and cooperative plays are all very common.

- Real construction begins after the age of two because they are then able to connect objects together instead of just bang or twist them.

- The following year they should be able to put objects together in order to form familiar things such as houses from an array of material.

- Older children may be interested in model construction, handicrafts, weaving etc, they may even make costumes for their play if they are skillful.