The curriculum guidance for the Foundation Stage is finally out and one of the most important and exciting aspects of the documentation is the emphasis placed on play as a key mode of learning for very young children.
This does not mean that you should just leave children to 'go and play' all by themselves all the time, nor that you cannot involve children in activities like baking bread, for example, where your role as an educator will be more instructional. The children will need help with reading the recipe, getting the balance of the ingredients right, paying attention to safety and hygiene, following the sequence of mixing and kneading the dough and leaving it to rise before baking. The children themselves may still see this as a playful and enjoyable activity, depending on how you involve them.
As the curriculum guidance for the Foundation Stage stresses, 'Children do not make a distinction between 'play' and 'work' and neither should practitioners. Children need time to become engrossed, work in depth and complete activities' (page 11).
But it seems that it is difficult for the general public and even for teachers of older children to understand play as a vehicle for learning and teaching. Those of us in the early years field are often subjected to misinformed comments like, 'You just play with them,' or 'Of course, they don't learn much in the early years, do they?'
What such comments imply is that learning in the early years is simple and undemanding. We do no teaching; children only learn properly when they start formal schooling. So one of our jobs must be to dispel these myths and to show that teaching young children requires observation, imagination, interpretation and subtle intervention.
We use play as one of our main vehicles for learning because young children come into the world wanting to know how everything 'works', from human relationships to aeroplanes, and play means first-hand involvement, not 'teaching by telling'.
One problem is that many practitioners are only just beginning to gain access to more in-depth training, so they will sometimes resort to teaching in ways more appropriate for older children because they do not yet have the knowledge they need to implement play approaches to a particular aspect of an early years curriculum.
Take literacy as an example. When the Desirable Outcomes were initiated, some early educators felt that what they were doing in relation to literacy was being endorsed. These practitioners were already using teacher-directed, formal literacy activities, partly because parents wanted their children to read and write before entering primary school and partly because they saw their literacy teaching as a way of helping disadvantaged children to gain the knowledge that parents from affluent homes pass on as a matter of course. But other practitioners balked at the idea of literacy before school, thinking that children under five were unready, and that they themselves were not trained teachers. This polarisation is something that has been found in research done by Canterbury Christ
Church University College.
But we have also seen some very exciting practice, where educators have developed play-based learning from their philosophy that babies and young children try to 'make sense' of their world. For example, these practitioners recognised that part of that world is the print that can be seen all around us. In setting up a pretend green-grocer's, hairdresser's or travel shop or an office, garage or cafe, relevant writing and reading materials are included. When children play with a construction kit or the large blocks, opportunities are provided for the children to plan or record their ideas and efforts.
Children and their families from one nursery went on a canal-boat trip and on their return they decided to try to construct a canal in the outdoor sand pit. They remembered passing farms and buildings such as houses and pubs. While some children scurried about experimenting with the sand, others tried to draw a 'map' of their journey, marking the buildings and the points where they began and ended their journey, as well as the place where cows were leaning over to drink from the canal. These activities were playfully contributing to the children's literacy learning (as well as to other areas of learning).
And this all happened with the subtle teaching of adults who provided materials, advice, information and encouragement and who acted as a 'memory bank' by asking questions such as 'Do you remember what we saw after the man in the black hat waved to us from the bridge?' Later in the week the staff provided materials for the children to experiment with water containment, and stories like The cow who fell in the canal, leaving that book, along with others about canals, accessible to the children to re-read alone or in small groups, whenever they chose. When photographs of the canal trip were developed, the children produced their own book of the outing, with the help of the adults, who wrote some but not all of the captions.
Why is play a better way?
Young children have only been on this earth a few years, so their experience and language is limited. For some, English may not be their first language and others may not have been encouraged to have conversations at home. So if adult talk and instruction is used as the main way of teaching, and if the talk is about things that the young children have rarely, if ever, experienced, however fluent their language, they will simply be confused and lost. Even worse, they could end up feeling inadequate as learners because they cannot 'get right' what adults demand.
In play activities, on the other hand, the children are in charge. Although some may need adult support if they are nervous in a new situation, most children will eagerly try out sand, water, clay, dressing-up clothes, construction kits, blocks, books, musical instruments, climbing equipment, writing and painting materials and so on, because they want to know what the materials do and what they can do with those materials.
Children seem to be born 'programmed' to want to answer these questions for themselves, to explore and learn from the materials, rather than to learn because adults tell them something. They do need adult intervention in their play at certain times in order to provide them with the language to discuss what they have learned; but there are great psychological benefits in doing it for themselves.
Because there are lots of possible answers in a play activity, play is a non-threatening mode of learning, you can't fail, so self-esteem is kept high or built up. The children's motivation is maintained; their 'ownership' of the learning activity means that they want to continue.
Play has a marvellous 'what if?' quality, it allows for creativity. You can invent and change the rules yourself, after negotiation with your playmates. Most play is, after all, social, so interpersonal skills are developed. Also, play usually requires the involvement of the whole child, exercising both body and mind synergistically and thus promoting brain connections.
An adult's role
Of course, the adults who help children learn through play, teaching through a play-based curriculum, need great understanding about children's learning, so they can make meaningful interpretations of their observations of the children's play and decide what to do or provide next. They also need the ability to act as effective and imaginative role models, say, turning up at the 'cafe' accompanied by a teddy who is rude and boisterous.
It has been said that every child needs a 'zany uncle', someone who will provide 'learning challenges' by asking funny, interesting questions, that tune in to young children's quests to understand everything around them. Play helps us take on that role.
Professor Tricia David works for the Centre for Educational Research at Canterbury Christ Church University College in Kent