Effective play-based interactions
depend first on teachers observing what children are doing, so that they can
get involved in ways that support their efforts and enable additional learning,
stimulate thinking, offer feedback at an appropriate level, and scaffold
children’s activity to a level just beyond what they can manage on their own. This
guide includes strategies you might use within play to support children’s
- Social development
- Language
- Executive function skills
- Role play
- Creativity and thinking
- Exploration and discovery
- Subject knowledge development
Strategies for supporting social
development through play
Children’s social development
progresses from associative or parallel play, in which there are limited
interactions between children and little dialogue or eye contact, through to
social play, where children play together but often in repetitive and limited
ways, and then to highly social and cooperative play, in which social groups
are relatively stable and united by a shared understanding of play goals,
complex play themes, and sustained episodes of intellectually demanding play.
Teachers can support the development of social competencies in play by:
- Organising activities for interaction with
teachers and other children, and promoting children’s collaboration,
conversations, and interactions: for example, repeating what children say so
that peers can understand them better, to support peer interactions and
maintain play episodes.
- Pointing
out the consequences of social behaviours, and encouraging children to
express their feelings.
- Prompting
social behaviours with specific cues such as ‘I think he would like a turn’,
or ‘Sarah is talking to you’, which has been found to increase the development
of social skills in both the target child and the peer. You might also offer
suggestions on how to participate in a play activity with peers, or use
questioning to help children start a play episode together.
Strategies for supporting
language development
Play provides a useful context for children
to practise using language by talking about their ideas and actions in play.
Encourage language use in play by:
- Inviting children to elaborate. Ask
questions that invite extended responses or that provoke ongoing inquiry to
support children to use more language while playing. For example, if a child
says they are building a bridge, ask them if they can describe what a bridge
is. Ask questions to extend their thinking such as ‘Can you tell me why you
need a bridge here?’ and ‘What blocks will you need?’, and ‘How will you
arrange them?’.
- Modelling language. Recast children’s comments
using more complex language, expanding on children’s utterances by making them
into complete sentences, for example, or adding adjectives. Circle back to
children’s ideas to provide repetition of concepts and language.
- Offering new vocabulary with definitions
of words as well as new words, for example ‘you’re using the triangle shape,
the one with three sides’ or ‘you are pedalling really vigorously, that means
really fast’. Research shows that children are more likely to learn a word when
provided with its definition.
- Using wait time to provide children with
the opportunity to think about and respond to your questions and comments, and
to convey the message that their thoughts are valued.
- Developing shared attention to sustain children’s
engagement in dialogue. Ensure interactions are reciprocal, two-sided and
responsive, and help children to think, reflect, and verbalise, without aiming
to lead to a correct answer.
Strategies to support executive
function skills and self-regulation through play
Executive function skills include
holding information in working memory long enough to complete a task,
inhibiting impulses, managing distractions and being cognitively flexible,
which means that children with these skills are more effective learners.
Executive function skills develop throughout childhood but can be supported by
games and activities including:
- Peek-a-boo, hiding games, and rhymes (particularly those with a surprise element to anticipate, such as the tickle at the end of ‘Round and round the garden’) for developing infants’ working memory.
- Action rhymes and memory games for developing toddlers’ working memory.
- Imaginative role play, inventing and telling stories, card and board games, and games such as Simon says or Musical Statues for supporting older children’s executive function skills including inhibitory control, focusing attention and working memory.
Strategies to support role play
Role play shows a
particular progression beginning with stereotypical and repetitive actions with
realistic objects, and leading to increasing capacities for sustained episodes
of imaginative play involving varied actions and roles, the symbolic use of
props, and the creation of rules and logical scripts within a group. Some
research suggests that young children do not always reach the mature level of sociodramatic
play that is associated with many important learning outcomes. The following
strategies can support children to progress to master or expert players:
- Assume a role in children’s play (for
example, be the patient while the child plays doctor) and elaborate and extend
on activities and language. Plan questions to ask and actions to provoke to
encourage children to add more detail and depth to the play, while allowing
children to freely explore and control the role play.
- Provoke children to plan or reflect on their
play actions and to translate them into narratives that others can
understand and contribute to by asking questions such as ‘how is it going?’, ‘what
do you need to do next?’, ‘what else might you do?, ‘how else might you do it?’,
and ‘are you sure?’ Encourage children to talk about their thinking and use of
language within the role play, in order to develop metacognitive (thinking
about one’s own thinking) and metacommunicative (thinking about one’s own
language use) capacities.
- Show children how signs, tools and materials
are used. Broaden activities associated with role play, for example, by
considering how to decorate a doctors’ waiting room with leaflets, posters and
advertisements, and introduce new tools into the play to introduce new
concepts, for example, adding a tape measure for measuring patients’ heights.
Instruction that is embedded in play and relevant to performing play roles is
found to generally be accepted by children when it supports their desire to
play independently.
- Assess and supplement children’s personal
experiences and knowledge of the role play setting, roles and actions, so
that play is not limited and stereotypical. For example, an expanded hospital
play might include an ambulance driver, a lab technician, a pharmacist and a
dietician; and patients might arrive at hospital with the family, or by
ambulance or emergency helicopter. Build knowledge through field trips, videos,
books and guest speakers, and help children to notice the different roles
people take and the associated scripts of behaviour to help them enact roles,
rather than just the resources and materials of the setting.
- Model how to use non-realistic props in a symbolic
way, while gradually introducing more unstructured props and removing
realistic ones, and eventually inviting children to make their own props.
Change the meaning of an object in imaginative play (in a way that aligns to
children’s play intentions) to help children acquire the capacity to perceive
things symbolically.
Strategies for encouraging
creativity and thinking
Teachers can encourage imagination
in all kinds of thinking, and use everyday and real problems as opportunities
for inquiry. Children are more motivated by concrete ‘here and now’ questions,
rather than abstract knowledge or long-term goals. Encourage creativity and
thinking by:
- Trusting
children to have ideas. Be careful not to do the majority of the work in
play, which some research finds teachers are likely to do. Show appreciation
for children’s creativity during play.
- Inviting children to imagine ideas, test and
refine them, using ‘imagine if’ scenarios for example, or scenarios for
collaborative problem-solving which involve thinking and theorising as well as
active physical engagement.
- Encouraging children to draw on previous
experience and existing knowledge to relate new knowledge to the familiar.
Ask children what something looks or is like, which is found to be more
effective than asking what something is.
- Creating opportunities for children to puzzle
and wonder about aspects of their world. Build on children’s existing
capabilities, experiences and interests.
- Inviting children to think and express their
ideas in different ways (such as in experimenting, role-playing, drawing,
or in conversation) in order to support them to make meaning from experience.
Draw children’s attention to the fact that they have different ideas and ways
of thinking about the topic, to encourage metacognitive thinking. Help children
think in complex ways (i.e. scientifically), and aim for sustained dialogues or
cognitively challenging intellectual dialogue which promotes children’s
higher-order thinking skills.
Strategies to support
exploration and discovery
Children can
learn quite abstract ideas if they are relevant and presented in a concrete way
through practical experience and exploration. Teachers can facilitate concept
development and understanding by:
- Using open-ended, exploratory comments and
questions or pointing out novel experiences or observations to build
children’s discovery of the attributes of materials and events.
- Challenging children to constantly make
meaning and sense of their environment and interactions, and support
children in interactions in which they construct new knowledge. You might do
this by inviting children to make comparisons to help children to notice
relations between ideas and things and to facilitate new understandings and
interpretations, or to make predictions (asking ‘I wonder what will happen if…’
or ‘If I do that, this will happen because…’), clarifying children’s
predictions and helping turn them into testable questions. You might also
encourage children to reflect or make connections (‘where have you see this
before?’), review learning (‘what did you find out?’ and ‘can you show me what
happened when …?’) and plan future experiments (‘what else might you try?’).
Invite children to explain their reasoning during and after solving a problem,
which can help you discover their misconceptions and level of understanding.
- Ensuring children receive feedback from
you or from the task or activity. For example, using different implements to
retrieve a toy floating in the middle of the water trough will give children
immediate feedback about distance, the comparative length of different tools,
and their problem-solving strategies.
Strategies to support subject
knowledge development in play
While encouraging children’s own
thinking, problem-solving and reasoning, also keep a view to introducing
content knowledge to children, which is found to add substance and depth to
children’s learning. The aim is to give children opportunities to engage with
established bodies of knowledge at the same time that they have important
concrete and particular experiences. Children’s subject knowledge can be
increased in sustained interactions with peers and teachers that:
- Emphasise subject knowledge, for example,
when discussing colour-mixing, space travel, or the mechanics of car design.
- Introduce concepts intentionally, using
children’s everyday understandings, experiences and interests as a context.
- Challenge children to use drawing or
model-making to reflect upon, organise and reorganise their knowledge.
- Discuss the connections between children’s
play and learning to help children develop their ideas about concepts. For
example, note connections between children’s play and books you have read (‘Is
this like the cave in the Bear Hunt story?’) or between experiences you have
shared together.
- Relate children’s discoveries to knowledge
systems such as science or maths. For example, when studying an ant,
encourage children to consider both the particular (ant) and the general
category (insect), the habitat in which the ant was found, and relations
between the ant and its habitat and food source. Making such connections helps
children develop rudimentary conceptual frameworks and theories in which
different discoveries are interconnected.
Further Reading
Bodrova, E., & Leong, D. J.
(2003). Chopsticks and counting chips: Do play and foundational skills need to
compete for the teacher’s attention in an early childhood classroom? Young Children,
58(3), 10-17.
Center on the Developing
Child. (n.d.). Enhancing and practicing executive function skills with
children from infancy to adolescence. Retrieved from developingchild.harvard.edu.
Fleer, M., & Pramling, N. (2015). A cultural-historical
study of children learning science: Foregrounding affective imagination in
play-based settings. Dordrecht: Springer.
Wasik, B. A., &
Jacobi-Vessels, J. L. (2017). Word play: Scaffolding language development
through child-directed play. Early Childhood Education Journal, 45, 769-776.
doi:
10.1007/s10643-016-0827-5
Dr Vicki Hargraves
Vicki runs our ECE webinar series and also is responsible for the creation of many of our ECE research reviews. Vicki is a teacher, mother, writer, and researcher living in Marlborough. She recently completed her PhD using philosophy to explore creative approaches to understanding early childhood education. She is inspired by the wealth of educational research that is available and is passionate about making this available and useful for teachers.
