Play is a basic human drive, like hunger, thirst, the impulses to run and to consider, the urges for companionship and solitude. The need for play is urgent and vital, and its deprivation has short- and long-term consequences on a child’s physical, emotional, social, cognitive and creative development.
Play is vital at all ages for expression and development of the self. Children play instinctively, boldly, and with a creative engagement with all aspects of their world. As adults the challenge is to resist the easy interpretations of nostalgia, and to facilitate rather than dominate children’s play in a way that encourages them in their growing independence and individuality.
Play can be usefully understood as a process rather than an activity, through which a child might imaginatively transform their surroundings in material, aesthetic and social ways, reinventing the familiar into the strange, the mundane into the magical. A child can imagine a cup into an ocean, a table into a fort, themselves into anything at all. Play can be creative, loud, quiet, physically demanding; its internal structure can be obvious to an observer or very subtle. Play can be many things, and it is always changing.
My favorite definition of play comes from a 10 year old girl named Meera, quoted in Play England documents:
“Play is what I do when everyone else stops telling me what to do.”
Playwork is the facilitation of free play with children and young people. This means a number of things, but it does not mean: leading games in which every child must take part, teaching skills such as representative painting or standing guard over equipment ensuring that “everyone gets their turn”. It often means... Read the full article at Morgan Leichter-Saxby
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