CHILD/Y O UT H A CT IV I T I E S
Unscheduled, unsupervised, screen-free
time for play is one of the most valuable
learning opportunities we can give our
children. Free play is now understood as
a necessity for young children to develop
social skills, but it also supports cognitive
development, builds emotional maturity
and is critical in the development of
children’s executive functioning.
This includes all types of free play: playing
and exploring alone, with a sibling, and, for
children 3 and older, playing with friends.
Playing alone, building with blocks is
great fine motor work and encourages
problem solving and creativity. Playing
chase teaches rule making, negotiating,
turn taking and exercise.
Rough and tumble play is important, too,
and plenty of time outdoors in nature is
extremely important. It is incredible what
discoveries children make outdoors and
how their pretend play is influenced by
logs and piles of leaves.
For young children, ages 2 to 8, pretend
play—also called dramatic play—is chock
full of learning value. When young children
engage in dramatic play they take on and
manipulate identity, and not just character
identity—they play out the ideas and practices
of their culture and their environment. It
provides a “living through” quality. They are
in the shoes of the princess, the dragon slayer,
the doctor and firefighter and so on.
The stories and scenarios acted out in
dramatic play at school, on the playground
or neighbor’s yard, or at home represent
individual experience and shared knowledge.
We learn about the world in different
ways, from different viewpoints, and each
of the ways in which we know it produces
different representations, or realities’…
the children become increasingly adept at
seeing the same set of circumstances from
multiple perspectives.
When children are engaged in pretend play
they imaginatively transform objects to fit
the context of their play. Engaged in this
kind of activity, they have the ability to hold
two representations of an object in their
mind at once—they can perceive a block
of wood as a block and pretend sandwich
at once. The child knows she can’t really
eat the sandwich, she is simply engaged
in symbolic thinking. Indeed, children
as young as 2, through play, have the
capacity to transform non-representational
objects in their minds, placing meaning
onto the object as something that “stands”
for something else.
This “double-thinking” is the same symbolmaking process necessary to read, write
and understand math. Written language
requires object transformation. Reading
and math are symbol systems. Marks on
a page stand for a letter or a word the way
the block stands for the sandwich.
Symbol making is a sophisticated process
and dramatic play is one of the ways
children practice it. In this imaginative play,
they are encoding and decoding meaning—
the root of pre-literacy work. Without
doubt, the more opportunity children have
to encode (this is just a block but I’m going
to pretend that it is a sandwich) and decode
(hey—she’s pretending to eat that, I guess
it’s supposed to be a sandwich), the sooner
they will be able to transfer this process onto
a page of letters and words.
Children have other opportunities for
symbol making. Visual arts is all about
encoding (this little stick and circle is me
and the big one is mommy) and decoding
(this blue part looks like a rocket ship). And
children who spend time outdoors every
day, observing and interacting with nature
notice: dark clouds in the sky stand for
“soon it’s going to rain,” and leaning trees
mean “windy.” But play, indoors or out,
is most rich with opp