Teaching Play Skills to Children with Disabilities: Research-Based Interventions and Practices

Play is a critical milestone that contributes to the learning and development of young children in multiple ways and is essential to their well-being. Play is also considered as a central component to promote school readiness and incorporates pre-literacy, language and numeracy skills. However, play deficits seem to be acutely apparent in some children with disabilities. This highlights the need to come to terms with the best evidence and explore the promising practices related to improved play skills for young children with disabilities. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of play-based learning in early childhood and early childhood special education and provide research-based recommendations on teaching play skills to young children with disabilities.     

Putting Faith Into Action: A Model for the North American Middle Class

Pluralism presents faith communities with the challenge of continuity and discontinuity in relation to the community's tradition. The educational question becomes: How do we initiate persons into the tradition of the faith community so that they will function as agents who can extend the tradition in creative ways in changing contexts? Play is one area of human activity that is concerned with what is and what might be. This paper explores the nature of the pretend play of young children, especially its “as‐if'” and “what‐if” dimensions. It suggests possibilities for using play in the education of children and adults.     

A Factor Analysis of Preschool Children's Play Strategies and Cognitive Style

ABSTRACT The social behaviours of 2400 3‐, 4and 5‐year old children attending an early childhood programme were observed, recorded, and analysed, and their cognitive style assessed. Factors underlying the play of preschool children based on their cognitive style were identified. Sex and age were considered in these social factors. ThePlay Rating Scale was used to record young children's behaviours in four different forms of play (physical, block, manipulative, dramatic); while theGoodenough‐Harris Drawing Test was used to determine the children's cognitive style. Factor analysis indicated two dimensions of play behaviours for each group of children. These factors had strong loadings with a range of items. The factors indicated that field‐dependent children participated more in social play activities, whereas field‐independent children engaged more in nonsocial play activities. The study suggests practical and research implications in promoting educational play using the children's cognitive style.     

Word Play: Scaffolding Language Development Through Child-Directed Play

Play is an important activity in young children’s lives. It is how children explore their world and build knowledge. Although free play, which is play that is totally child directed, contributes to children’s learning, self-regulation and motivation, adults’ participation in children’s play is critical in their development, especially their language development. Guided by children, adults can help scaffold children’s language, and especially their learning. We suggest that adults scaffold children’s language during play by using research based strategies such as asking questions that invite extended responses and new inquiry, provide meaningful feedback and effectively use wait time, which provides children with the opportunity to respond to adults’ comments and questions. The goal is to provide adults with strategies to scaffold children’s language development during play while allowing children to direct their own play activities.     

Playthings as learning tools

Play can occur at any time or in any place; it bears directly on the development of such fundamentals as the learning of language and mathematical ideas and the development of thinking skills and social roles. The following three activities focus on how playthings and play activities contribute to children's intellectual development. We want to state at the outset, however, that play also contributes to children's physical, social, and emotional development. We recognize that play is important to all these areas. But here we consider the contribution of play to one area of development, that is, intellectual growth, or what children can learn.     

Play and Creativity: Developmental issues

Play and creativity have been linked in numerous ways. Theoretically, pretend play fosters the development of cognitive and affective processes that are important in the creative act. Russ's (1993) model of affect and creativity identified the major cognitive and affective processes involved in creativity and the relations among them, based on the research literature. Central to both play and creativity is divergent thinking. Both cognitive and affective processes in play have been related to divergent thinking in children. In a longitudinal study, quality of fantasy and imagination in play predicted divergent thinking over time. Divergent thinking itself was relatively stable over time. An important question is whether play can facilitate creativity. Play has been found to facilitate insight ability and divergent thinking. Studies have also shown that children can be taught to improve their play skills. Future research studies should: (i) investigate specific mechanisms that account for the relationship between play and creativity; (ii) develop play intervention techniques that improve play skills; and (iii) carry out longitudinal studies with large enough samples to enable the application of statistical procedures such as path analysis.     

Play's importance in school

The purpose of this study is to contribute knowledge on and gain an understanding of elementary school teachers' perspectives on the function of play in children's learning processes. The study is qualitative with a hermeneutical approach and has George Herbert Mead as a theoretical frame of reference. Interviews have been carried out with seven teachers. The material was interpreted into four main categories: learning, development, teaching, and socialisation. Play used in school results in positive social effects, as pointed out by the teachers. The social and the academic skills that play brought to the children were also made obvious in the study's findings.     

Australian Play School: viewing and post-viewing behaviours in young children

Australian Play School is a children’s television programme developed in collaboration with early childhood educators. It is screened free to air across Australia. Two hundred and twenty-four adult carers of young children aged 1–8?years completed an online survey via a link on the Play School website. The survey addressed child behaviours during and after viewing, and adult perceptions about which programme segments were most engaging to the child. Play School elicited a large number and variety of behavioural responses from children during and after viewing. The types of responses elicited suggest that viewing the programme may be beneficial for children’s development and learning. Results were tempered by the age of the child and this, as well as the impact of carer attitudes and carer input during and after viewing, needs to be explored further before results are translated into recommendations for programming and optimal viewing strategies.     

‘Move over and make room for Meeka’: the representation of race,otherness and indigeneity on the Australian children's television programme Play school

Play school is an icon of Australian children's television and an important part of Australian life – this programme, perhaps more than any other, has taken and continues to take centre stage in our living rooms and social worlds as young children. Play school is invested with an enormous amount of cultural capital and hence plays a significant role in the way that children engage and learn about social interaction, life and values in Australian culture. Aimed at preschoolers under the age of five, everything in the programme is done to relate as closely as possible to the social world and developmental level of the child and thereby assist their social, psychological and cognitive development. Through a combination of songs and dances, stories, dress up games and moments to ‘look through the window’ into the real world outside Play school, children are presented with a variety of sounds and images to engage with social concepts. In this paper we explore discourses of race, otherness and Indigeneity on Play school by deconstructing Aboriginalist images and representations featured on the programme and in doing so ask questions about the types of ‘race making’ that this programme engages in.     

Play in Children with Severe Multiple Disabilities: Play with toys - a review

Play in children with severe and profound disabilities is discussed. The focus is on toys and play material and the role of adults, such as parents, caregivers, and teachers. In this review article theoretical aspects on children's play are briefly described.     

Children learning to use technologies through play: A Digital Play Framework

Digital technologies are increasingly acknowledged as an important aspect of early childhood education. A significant problem for early childhood education has been how to understand the pedagogical use of technologies in a sector that values play‐based learning. This paper presents a new framework to understand how children learn to use technologies through play. The Digital Play Framework is based on the sociocultural concept of tool mediation and Corrine Hutt's work regarding epistemic and ludic activity as basis for understanding play. The Digital Play Framework presents a series of indicators for how children learn to use technologies as cultural tools, first by exploring the functionality of technologies through epistemic activity, and second by generating new content through ludic activity.     

Meme Engineers: children as producers of musical culture

This paper examines the ways in which young children construct and negotiate musical meaning as song-makers in a post-modern consumerist musical world. A critical analysis of the presentation of music in two popular Australian children's television programmes (Play School and Hi-5) and the ways in which such media impact upon children's constructions of music and musical understanding is presented. This analysis provides a context for the examination of tensions that exist between a modernist account of what constitutes musical understanding in the young child, and an account that is cognisant of post-modern aesthetics. The implications of this concerning views of children's musical development and curriculum decision making are discussed and a view of the child as an active agent in the construction of her musical worlds is illustrated through an examination of the musical narratives of a 4-year-old child.     

Developing a play‐based communication assessment through collaborative action research with teachers in northern Canadian indigenous communities

With the goal of developing culturally appropriate approaches for assessing and supporting children's language use, teachers of 4‐to 6‐year‐old children in northern Canadian rural and Indigenous communities are involved in a 6‐year collaborative action research project. Teachers video record children's interactions during dramatic and construction play and then meet with university researchers to carry out inductive analyses of ways in which children use language to achieve social purposes. From these analyses, a Play‐based Communication Assessment has been created. Examples from two teachers' classrooms in one Indigenous community are used to show how play contexts and the still‐evolving play‐based communication assessment provide opportunities for teachers to recognise and build upon the linguistic and cultural resources that children bring to classrooms. Through the play‐based assessment and action research processes, teachers have come to recognise the richness of children's language when they are engaged in play and have gained understandings of their community's culture. Teachers and researchers are exploring ways to capture children's non‐verbal communication abilities through this assessment approach.     

游戏治疗的内涵及其对智力障碍儿童心理发展的意义

游戏治疗是帮助儿童解决心理问题的有效方法,了解游戏治疗产生发展及其内涵对特殊教育领域开展游戏治疗的实践和研究有重要意义。游戏治疗对智力障碍儿童的心理发展也必然发挥重要作用。     

Toy libraries

Toys are not just for playing. Toys are the tools of play that help children develop their social awareness, imagination, visual motor capabilities and thinking processes. Play is a very serious activity for children worldwide and often represents a primary and valuable means of learning. Since many toys are important learning instruments, children should have easy access to appropriate toys in order to explore and choose those which interest them. In addition, parents need a place where they can consult with someone about what toys are appropriate for their child's development. Toy libraries provide this service.     

Kids,carpentry, and the preschool classroom

A great deal of attention has been given over the past few years to the educational value of play in the lives of very young children (Glickman 1979, Pellegrini 1980, Yawkey & Fox 1981, Hoot, 1984). Play has been shown to serve as an indispensible medium for supporting the cognitive, physical, emotional, and social development of children. Where play does exist, it is generally found in the housekeeping, block, and sand/water play areas. Yet, many classrooms overlook one of the most developmentally appropriate and enjoyable play media of all — woodworking.Susan Anderson is a teacher of young children and member of the School Board in Lake Dallas, Texas. James L. Hoot is head of the Early Childhood Education Program at North Texas State University, Denton, Texas.     

Grade 1 Students’ Out-of-School Play and Its Relationship to School-Based Academic,Behavior, and Creativity Outcomes

Research Findings: This study explored the relationship between play and child development at the Grade 1 level. As previous research has noted a sudden curtailment of classroom play during this period, the relationship between play at home and children's school grades, behavior, and creativity scores was examined using correlational and regression analyses. In particular, this study sought to assess whether particular types of play (pretend play, active physical play, construction play, etc.) and social arrangements during play (play with siblings, with parents, alone, with friends) predicted any of the outcome measures. A total of 56 children ages 6 and 7 from suburban areas outside of Montreal, as well as their parents and teachers, participated in the study. Practice or Policy: Findings indicated that children spent between 1 and 2 hr playing after school each day and that the most common form of play was active physical play. The most common social arrangement during play was play with siblings. Children's free time in the morning and freedom to choose their play activities in the afternoon were predictive of children's academic progress. Watching others play and the ability to choose their own activities in the afternoon predicted positive adaptive behaviors at school. Play with commercial toys and playing alone were predictive of creativity scores.