Understanding and Supporting Children's Play PDF

## Understanding and Supporting Children's Play Together, the teacher mediates and models empathy and fairness, the use of language for problem solving, and the divergent thinking essential to negotiation with others who are different from oneself. - Through props and ideas shared in conversation...

## Understanding and Supporting Children's Play Together, the teacher mediates and models empathy and fairness, the use of language for problem solving, and the divergent thinking essential to negotiation with others who are different from oneself. - Through props and ideas shared in conversation and storytelling. - Photos and documentation helps the teacher challenge children to complicate their playscripts and expand their repertoire of dramatic themes. The teacher models appropriately complex oral language and integrates opportunities for literacy and numeracy as more abstract modes of representation. **Developmentally, the thinking of 4- and 5-year-olds is preoperational, learning by doing.** - If kindergarten is children's first organized group experience, it serves as a benign orientation to the people, place, and materials of the school. - A chance to learn to play together, be considerate of one's peers, and recognize the teacher's authority. Although many children now enter kindergarten with several years' group experience, their modes of knowing and doing are appropriately those of 5-year-olds. - Kindergarten, for a competent preschooler, is the opportunity to demonstrate and enjoy mastery of play. - Experience the peak of success in doing what one does best in response to the cognitive challenge that play offers children. In play, (Smilacky, 1968) children learn to plan (Reynolds, 1988). - In contrast, “academic” kindergartens reflect a deficiency model rather than a competence model, demanding premature practice of what one doesn’t know how to do. **A kindergarten without substantial playtime puts everyone at a disadvantage, for play is still the primary reality for its members.** - Play contains the only set of circumstances children understand from beginning to end. "I can do this well,” the kindergartners seem to say. "I can be this effectively. I understand what is happening to me and to the other children." (Paley, 2009, p. 61) ## Six to Eight: Investigation Mastery of age-related tasks is the best possible preparation for children about to enter school. - Dyson (1989) describes in detail the ways in which the oral language and drawing skills that primary children have already attained help them in their efforts to practice story writing. - A primary classroom in which at writing time children are free to talk and draw, as well as write, enables them to utilize all the skills gained in play as they move into the tasks of the stage Erikson identified as industry. - Piaget used "concrete operational" to describe the mental capacities of children ages 6, 7, and 8; they are rational thinkers who are able to use logic (as much of the Western world defines it) in the understanding of their hands-on experiences. - They are able to generalize.