Expand upon what you’ve learned from the chapter by watching the video and answering the questions that follow.
1. Play is the medium through which young children learn. Through play, children build cognitive, social, physical, emotional, and language skills. This video describes the stages of play (onlooker, solitary, parallel, associative, and cooperative) during many different curriculum activities.
From your observations, what are the characteristics of cooperative play? Describe at least four elements of cooperative play that a teacher might note in the classroom.
2. How can teachers ensure that play areas and learning centers are set up appropriately for children? Describe two ways that you would test the child-friendliness of the areas/centers at your early education center.
+++ when you do this one can you do them question by question+++
video
[ Music ]
>> [Background noise] Did you like that activity today?
>> Yeah.
>> Look at my hands.
>> I want to have pink hands today.
>> Play is the work of preschoolers. [Background conversation] Play lets them invent, discover, experience, and examine their world. Play is a way for them not only to learn about the world, but also themselves. It’s through play that children are able to build cognitively, socially, and emotionally.
[ Inaudible ]
Onlooker behavior is in toddlers as well as in preschool age, which is around three. The first stage is just watching. In the preschool age, in three years old, four years old, five years old, you might see one child watching the behaviors of another child trying to figure out what it is that this older peer, or more mature peer, is doing. The next stage of play is solitary play, and this is really great development because it’s showing that a child can actually play by themselves and doesn’t need an external force or external peers or adults in order to engage in play. This starts around the toddler stage, so maybe 18 months to two and a half years. There can be times when a child who’s engaged in solitary play creates a whole story and is actually communicating with herself while she’s engaged in this play.
[ Inaudible ]
A child might be doing an art project, for example, cutting out objects and pasting them on that sheet. For an adult, cutting and pasting seems like it’s a pretty obvious and straightforward activity, but for a child to be able to learn how to cut and build those fine motor skills that’s a type of play that’s absolutely essential in their physical development much less their cognitive and their emotional development, too. The next stage of play is parallel play, and this is when two children play side by side. There’s not a lot of interaction between them and not a lot of that language building, but it’s all about the object that they’re playing with and manipulation of that object. So, again, in a sensory table activity, children may be playing with rice, with gears, with letters, with all these objects, and a sensory table, whether it’s sand or water, and they’re engaging in play themselves, yet they’re right near their peers. So they’re able to build some of their own skills by slightly observing what’s happening around them, yet, again, the focus is on that object and not on each other and the interaction between each other. Another great example of parallel play is when children play with adults, and this is where teachers can really build their skills as they enter child’s play, and they should be entering it thinking of parallel play when they enter play.
[ Background conversation ]
So they’re not coming in with their adult skills with all their great, fine motor manipulation. They’re seeing where the children are and where their development is, and they enter at that level of that development so that they’re not overshadowing the child, and they’re able to just play side by side doing what the child’s doing and taking almost direction from the child instead of coming in on their own pace.
>> Are they babies? Or are they big?
>> We’re big.
>> How old are you?
>> I’m 10.
>> And I’m 11.
>> [Inaudible] Oh. So what are you girls doing today?
>> Sewing a puppy dog. [Inaudible]
>> You singing songs?
>> Yeah.
>> One of the best things that play allows a child to do is to build their oral language skills, so, for example, they’re able to build language that they don’t normally use. If a child’s playing in a dramatic play area with medical equipment, they don’t usually use the words “shot” and “medicine” and “doctors” in everyday conversations with their parents or their peers, so play lets them try out new language they couldn’t otherwise experience.
>> We’re doctors and we have to check them what they need. They’re dangerous [Inaudible]. Yep. This baby has fire. She eat them. She eat fire.
>> She eat fire?
>> I can check her.
>> Are you going to help her?
>> Yep.
>> The next stage of play is associative play, and you start to see this when the child is entering that preschool stage, so ages three to four. This is when a group of children will be playing, and another child will come in and enter that play, but there’s not a clear set of goals. They’re not trying to accomplish something. They’re not cooperating. They’re just entering play and possibly leaving when they feel like going to a different learning area or a different play setting. A lot of times what you see is children all doing the same activity. They’re definitely communicating. They’re building these oral language skills that are so important with the stages of play, but that they’re not trying to all accomplish the same thing, and they haven’t set roles for each other.
>> [Background noise] Ok, let’s do it. Let’s get started.
>> The next stage of play is cooperative play. You usually see this when children are around the age of four. This is when they actually start to engage in rules themselves, and they set the rules. They enter play together and before they start playing, or sometimes while they’re playing, they set the expectations of this play. So, again, they’re building amazing language, amazing oral language skills with each other and playing off of each other. Some of the things you might see in cooperative play is children actually giving each other directions. For example, they’re laying the road with these foam road pieces. They might direct each other as to where to lay the roads so that they can each individually drive their cars around.
>>
[ Background conversation ]
Ok. That’s good.
>> No we don’t. We need more.
>> I want the last one.
>> I want to do the last one.
>> I want to do the last one.
>> There went the cars.
>> [Inaudible] the cars and the people.
>> They might give each other the roles in little block people. “You be the police car, I’ll be the fire truck,” so that we can actually engage and have a story going on and giving each other the expectations and the directions of that play.
>> You did a good job. Were you starting [inaudible] here?
>> Yes.
>> Can you finish [inaudible] for me? It’s right over here, and then I’ll come back, and you can clean up that.
>> New teachers need to be very, very mindful and thoughtful of the play that’s occurring in their classrooms. They need to not only set up the play experiences for the children, but also really think of each and every area of their classroom and how would a child actually engage in play in this area. They should get on their knees and actually go around the room so they’re looking at everything at child height and child level, so that they are able to experience these areas in the classroom and the learning centers as a child would. ==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
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