Chapter 2
Balanced Play: How It Makes Kids’
Lives Better
What Is Play?
Play is different for every age group. For an
adult, play my be building or making something, like Joann from “Fixer Upper”
decorates the houses her and her husband fix up. While for others, it may be
participating in marathons. For children, play maybe taking all the pots and
pans out of the cabinet like my daughter did when she was younger. While it may
be play for her, it wasn’t so much for mommy and daddy. LOL! The challenge is
defining play. Play can be almost anything as long as it fulfills certain
characteristics. The authors of Play for
a Change define play as, “what children and young people do when they
follow their own ideas, in their own way and for their own reasons” (2008, 10).
Why Is Play Valuable?
Play is not limited to just humans. Go to a zoo or
watch animals on a TV show and you will see them using things in their surroundings for play. I remember watching a gorilla at Animal Kingdom with my
daughter playing with her food bucket. She would roll it around, place it on
her head, and play peekaboo with us watching her. This was her form of play.
Another gorilla in the area was picking leaves off of a tree and making things
with them. This was their form of play. Play benefits us in many ways by shaping
our brain. It helps us to be flexible, resilient, and allows us the ability to
deal with complex situations. It allows helps develop stress-response. Think of
children building a block tower together. They are working hard putting the
pieces in the right spot. Their brain is learning to take risks. If they place
a block in a certain place, will the tower fall over? Sometimes it does and
they have to start all over. Or another students places a block in a different
spot than they wanted it to be place? This is helping them with resilience and
building their ability to adapt. As you can see, play is very valuable in
helping children develop their minds. Children need to be able to play. We need
to provide them with balanced play just as we do with balanced literacy.
Kinds of Play
There are many different kinds of play to be
incorporated into balanced play for children. They are fantasy play,
constructive play, games with rules, and rough-and-tumble play. Each one helps
to enhance a child’s development.
Fantasy/Imaginative Play
Fantasy play is when children choose an imaginary
scenario in which they act out roles and determine a set of rules for the
roles. This is usually done when children play store. They assign different
roles: cashier, shopper, stock person, etc. Each person has their own role and
they determine the rules for each role. The stock person or cashier isn’t going
to be the one buying the items. The same could be said for my students who
loved to play kitchen during inside recess time. Several of them would be the
cooks, while others would be the waiters/waitresses and customers. They would
create menus and even write down orders on paper before serving the customers.
Sometimes if they didn’t have an item they wanted, they would substitute
another item for it. For example, one of my students used a block as a phone
for taking take-out orders. This helped her develop her abstract thinking.
Constructive Play
Constructive play is an organized form of play
that is goal/product oriented. Children use materials to create something. Most
constructive play uses materials like blocks, playdough, art materials, and
recycled materials. Children can use these materials in a variety of ways to
meet standards. For instance, children can use the materials to make murals or
costumes for characters to retell a story. By using straws, paper, beads, and
other materials, children can create something, examining, exploring, sorting, and
arranging the materials. This taps into the STEM/STEAM mindset. By
incorporating this type of play, we are allowing them to problem solve,
connect, deepen their understanding, an replicate their learning while keeping
math, science, and engineering in the classroom.
Games with Rules
Games with rules helps children build important
social skills such as cooperation. Think of your students playing hide and
seek. Now think of them playing hide and seek, where the seeker isn’t covering
their eyes. What would happen? For certain type of play, there are rules that
need to be followed in order for the game to work. By allowing for this type of
play, they are learning to communicate and develop healthy competition. They
are understanding what it means to win and how it feels to lose. This is an
essential part of building empathy. This type of play also helps them to
develop their growth mindset by teaching them to learn and grow in a risk free
environment for failure.
Rough-and-Tumble Play
Rough-and-tumble play is often known as play
fighting or horseplay. We most commonly see this type of play on the
playground. We see it in the form of running and chasing each other, playing
tag, wrestling, and having sword fights. We often discourage this type of play because
we often think that they will take it to far. This type of play is often controversial,
but it is yet very critical to the development of children. Roughhousing is
necessary to help social and cognitive development as well as physical development. According to Stuart Brown (2010), a “lack of experience with
rough-and-tumble play hampers the normal give-and-take necessary for social
mastery, and has been linked to poor control of violent impulses later in life”
(89). When children engage in play fighting, they learn what it means to take
it too far and build the rationale that their friends won’t want to play with
them anymore. We do have to monitor this as teachers to help them determine
when they have taken it too far at times.
Stages of Play
When children are playing, there are different
stages in which children fall into based on their development of play. There
are six stages of play:
-Unoccupied
Behavior: Children will randomly observe anything that catches their
interest. If nothing catches their interest, they will often fidget, spin in
circles, or bang hands of table. This is the most immature form of play.
-Onlooker
Behavior: This child chooses to observe others at play and will often ask
them questions about their play but doesn’t play herself.
-Solitary
Play: This child chooses to play alone. The child might play near another
group, but will not join them.
-Parallel
Play: This child will choose to play with the same materials alongside another
child, but will create or build their own thing.
-Associative
Play: Children who choose to play together in a group using the same
materials or even play the same activity. For example, children may be playing
with the blocks, but each one if building their own building to make a city.
-Cooperative
Play: Children plan how they will play. They discuss and negotiate their
roles. This is the most mature form of play.
3 Take Aways
1.
Each form of play has its benefits.
2.
During play, children are learning to create, innovate,
explore, and develop.
3.
Rough-and-tumble play shouldn’t be discouraged and
it is essential for them to build the rationale of “taking things too far”.
What are your 3 take aways?
