Nov 05 2008
Shannon will sit happily at a craft table in the book corner. She will play in the home corner and enjoys playdough. Shannon does not ever choose the sit- on toys and has never been seen to push teddy or dolly in the pushchair. Her mum says that Shannon still sits in a buggy when they go out.
Possible reasons for this behaviour Continue Reading »
Nov 05 2008
Victoria loves dressing up and playing in the home corner. She likes to choose the children who play with her and she always has to be the ‘mum‘. In fact, whenever she plays this she insists on being in charge and dominates the play. If another child attempts to exert any control, Victoria becomes upset and cannot accept the situation. She has, on occasion, used physical means like pushing the child away in order to make her feelings clear. Continue Reading »
Sep 28 2008
This sets out in brief format some ideas you might like to think about when planning a challenging play and learning environment. The way in which you organise this is key to children’s learning and development. Some questions you may ask are as follows.
How can I:
Sep 25 2008
Some characteristics of play cut across different ages. Play integrates brain functions and blends the rational and the imaginative, the intellectual and the emotional, the linear (logical) and the nonlinear (imaginative, intuitive, and aesthetic), the mundane and the creative. As a process, play serves as a lymphatic system that lubricates, transports, and transforms the transitions of one phase of understanding into another. As a product, play—especially sociodramatic play—enhances development in language, cognition, social competence, and creative fluency. Continue Reading »
Sep 05 2008
The more opportunity a child has to enjoy the richness and freewheeling fantasy of play in all its forms, the more solidly will his development proceed. Later encounters with learning, games, and sports will strengthen and enhance his knowledge and mastery of the world. But for games and sports, or even for learning to be fully meaningful, his prior experience with play must already have provided a firm foundation. This is why culturally deprived children who had little chance to play and were little played with by parents have such a hard time in school—without the experience of succeeding in play, they do not trust themselves to succeed in school. For this reason, it is not sufficient for parents to wait to share in play activities when they reach a more formalized stage. The older child’s activities may offer more intrinsic interest to a parent, but by that time it may be too late. Both kinds of experience—play and games—are necessary for growing up well. Children lose out on a great deal if TV viewing or even activities such as academic learning prevent them from having rich experiences with both play and games. The ability to enjoy games builds on the play experience. Continue Reading »
Aug 20 2008
Few other types of play can quite compare with doll play for eliciting deep parental involvement. Still, there are many other aspects of children’s play which can affect a parent deeply, through recollections and other feelings it activates, particularly when a child’s play reminds the parent of having played with the same toy, or having played in similar fashion. Also, the older the child gets, the more easily do play activities echo not only the parent’s own childhood experiences, but also his present hobbies or recreations. For example, the teenager who can play a serious game of chess has an experience very similar to his parent’s in doing so. Continue Reading »
Aug 20 2008
If we truly took our child’s play as seriously as we take our own tasks, we would be as loath to interrupt it as we are reluctant to be interfered with when we are working. This is the pattern demanded by consistency and a sense of fairness; and one reward for thus respecting our child’s play is that it enhances his own sense of play as an important activity in the whole context of family life.
This is not to say that parents always take play lightly. After all, we want our children to enjoy themselves; we buy them toys and take them to the playground; we are conscientious about providing opportunities to play. Continue Reading »
Aug 12 2008
Some children keep score on their ability to exercise this type of self- control, and they know very well that the issue is the ability of their mind, or will, consciously to dominate the spontaneous reactions of their body. These games are so common that one may assert that all children, at one time or another, engage in games whose main purpose is to test themselves and their performance. I knew one six-year-old, for example, who kept score through checking off one of two columns which he had labeled “Me” and “My mind,” indicating that for him the issue was not whether he or his partner won, but how well his mind could control his body. Continue Reading »
Aug 09 2008
But even the magic of reading will not sufficiently affect many children if their parents do not place high value on “book learning.” The great emotional investment of parents in reading makes it uniquely attractive to their child, since then reading forms another link tying the parents closely to the child. I am sure that Jewish literacy was helped by the fact that it was customary on the day the child entered one of the yeshivas (Talmudic schools) for the father to carry his son, Continue Reading »
Aug 09 2008
Learning to read, so basic to all academic achievements, illustrates not only these parallels, but their importance if intellectual subjects are to be learned well and to attain deep personal meaning. The child who through playing games of progressively greater complexity has mastered the knack of controlling to some measure the largely chaotic tendencies of his unconscious and that of harnessing its energies for largely conscious and reality-oriented purposes will find it relatively easy to apply the same skills to the learning of reading. Continue Reading »
