The Importance of Play for Children
The importance of play for children cannot be overstated. Outdoor play enhances the child’s social and communication skills by connecting with the other members of the peer group. School administrators could greatly improve the life skills as well as the health of the child by carefully introducing play and selected outdoor games. The games could also reduce the increasing problems on obesity. The parents as well as the school administrators should be aware of the role of outdoor play in improving the health of the children. This could be considered as some form of physical activity that will increase the child’s muscle mass, metabolism, and improve the behavior of the child towards exercise.
Children learn more skills in their natural environment such as negotiating with the use of play instruments, dealing with life situations, setting up priorities, exercising self-control, and making decisions on certain situations. The importance of outdoor play is how it brings out children’s creativity. By using imagination, primary school students can transform their environment. Outdoor play should deliver a variety of programs and play equipment to suit the needs and interests of each child. The child will benefit by understanding and exploring the outdoor play environment, the dynamics of the game, and the purpose of the play equipment. The importance of play for children is that it requires careful planning, design, instruction delivery, orchestration of games, and play equipments to motivate the child to participate, cooperate, and take an active part in the games. The selection of the equipments is a crucial to designing outdoor play programs because it can enthuse the child and increase participation.
Exploration is a key part of the importance of play for children. The schools and practitioners interact with children based on their influence and understanding of childhood. In the United Kingdom, the government issued policies and values, which serve as guidelines for schools to advocate outdoor play. Practitioners and researchers understand the importance of play for children’s learning and they play a major role in supporting outdoor play in school contexts and as a whole. Practitioners who understand the importance of play for children allow their students to explore freely and engage in outdoor learning because it enables the youngsters to participate fully in their learning. Practitioners who adhere to plan and learning allow children to ‘explore’ their outdoor environment and make sense of their surroundings.
Creativity is another element of the importance of play for children. Intuitively, play and creativity shares much in common. Play often facilitates children to symbolically transformation objects and actions in new and unusual ways. These transformations are similar to how novelists use imaginative combinations of ideas — the product of creative thinking. The motivation to explore is embedded in the surfacing of more complex cognitive capacities and, for Piaget, this exploration is a cognitive process closely linked to the development of intelligence. In addition to recognizing the importance of play in early childhood education, there are many supplemental ways to foster creativity in education — in terms of the broader discourse, as well as the close-up conceptualisation. Another way of encouraging creativity is by curiosity; educators should encourage parents to promote children’s curiosity through everyday activities, by enabling them to explore, experiment, and discover for themselves. Curiosity is a strong drive, but cannot flourish in the absence of a stimulus.
Depending on one’s point of view, concerning the importance of play for children, play can be regarded as deeply serious and purposeful or trivial and purposeless. Plan can facilitate high levels of motivation, creativity, and learning, or it can be relegated to little more than just messing around. Play is a jumbo category which encompasses a multiplicity of activities, some of which are conducive to learning, but many of which are not. Children can be viewed as creators of mental knowledge. As learners, children collaboratively construct the knowledge and interactive skills of their social world through interaction with and action on the environment.
Children’s curiosity and exploration, which are expressions of their eagerness to know, can be nurtured and become a key motivational force for the acquisition of knowledge, which illustrates the importance of play for children. Although generally being neglected in pedagogy, attempts have been made to encourage curiosity and exploration in the classroom and at home. Various instructional design strategies, such as introducing conceptual conflict and creating an atmosphere for questions, foster children’s curiosity. The physical characteristics of the setting will influence decisions in terms of facilitating and equipment available, and it may be that the restricted space does not allow practitioners to offer the range of provisions on a daily basis. Pleasure, aesthetics, and play are essential in any act of learning and knowledge building. Learning must be pleasurable, appealing, and fun. Most theorists and educators agree that play involves free choice, enjoyment, self-motivation and a focus on process rather than product.
Though a number of researchers have confirmed the importance of play in child development, some viewed play as an unimportant activity within children. Compared with other countries, the importance of play for children is not widely accepted in the United States, although notable exception, such as Montessori schools, exist. Most traditional teachers in preschool are reported to scarcely encourage or take the initiative to fully organize physical activities, even during outdoor play, to support physical activities. Play and recess time in kindergarten and primary schools have often been reduced or replaced by structured lessons as current education policy promotes rote memorization and learning of factual knowledge opposing play exploration. The education policy has evolved so much which promote the mentality of scoring high marks on paper based assessments to children and children admitting to schools at younger ages such as “just turned four” instead of the average age five of starting school. The quality of curriculum for the young children are being criticized because of over-formalization and lack of more informal and play-based approaches used in the nursery settings. It is time that educators acknowledge the importance of play for children’s learning and development.
The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) has a set of visions and values target to promote outdoor learning in young children. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) (2009) had acknowledged the importance of instilling play in young children’s learning according to their interest. This has lead to EYFS and Early Learning Goals had provide practitioners of young children and reception age the sufficient flexibility in teaching children according to their interest and provide structured knowledge in playful forms to enhance children’s learning.
Parents’ upbringing and beliefs play a major role in children’s learning and development. Play-learning beliefs remains solely on the individual’s cultural and personal experiences which parents and experts may hold different views on play and learning. Parental participation appeared to be a threat to practitioners in issues pertaining on to power relationships in the classroom where practitioners fear the ‘losing of power’ when parents gain more say in the curriculum. This is well reflected through the different education systems of European nation and Asian countries. For instance, Chinese education traditions are greatly influenced by Confucianism where teachers are deemed as professionals who are knowledgeable to be relied on when it comes to children’s education. Therefore, the acceptance of accustoming parents’ views on the curriculum would seem to be interferences to the teachers.
This way of describing educational practice is close in nature to practice currently taking place in Northern Italy’s Reggio Emilia preschools. There, the preschools operate on a pedagogy of relationships. Hutt (1979) was a pioneer in drawing the attention of early childhood educators to the epistemic nature of play and its implication on the design of the learning environment for preschool children play and creativity have much in common. Play often involves symbolic transformations in which objects and actions are used in new and unusual ways. These transformations are similar to the novel imaginative combination of ideas, which are the product of creative thinking.
With schools and policies imposing much importance on academic learning, parents’ roles and views towards creativity learning have shifted throughout the years. Findings have confirmed the growing emphasis on early academic preparation for young children in learning through formal, structured way rather than play based approach. Although most educators acknowledge the importance of play for children, the use of outdoor environment is dependent on good weather. Problems arise linking to poor weather conditions are the lack of facilities such as effective drying and storage facilities, wet-weather gear for all children and parents’ complaints over dirty clothing of children. Parents are reported that children’s free time at home are largely substitute by academic focused activities rather than play time. According to various authors, had recently argued that schools may be outstanding practice settings to promote children’s physical activity and promoting favorable health behaviors and attitudes towards physical fitness.
Schools would be the best place to initiate physical activities as children spent most time in schools other than home. However, the implementation of promoting the importance of outdoor play lies in schools and teachers’ decisions. In reiteration of the above point, the conventional findings perceived that teachers have little control over the outside play space due to the nature of outdoor environment. Therefore it may be assumed that teachers’ enthusiasm have much impact in supporting outdoor play. Teachers’ recognition to the importance of outdoor play and physical play will motivate educators to plan goals.
Reports show that children would prefer to be in the outdoor environments than indoor. This shows children learn best when they have a passion towards the activities taking place in the life. In comparison with country that supports play as learning, country such as Norway where the curriculum and teachers make full use of the outdoor environment when working with young children. Kindergarten children have access to the wild landscapes in the neighboring area. Recreation associated with outdoor play in natural landscapes is part of Scandinavian children’s daily kindergarten experience and learning.
October 13, 2010
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