Chp 10 - Play and the Learning Environment

Associative Play

Begins at about 3.5 years old. Children truly play with each other and borrow and loan play materials among one another.

Sociodramatic Play

A form of dramatic play with more than one player socially interacting around a theme and a time trajectory over which the play continues and evolves. Children enact real-life types of activities.

Play

A great variety of behaviors, such as swinging, sliding, running, digging in the dirt, building with blocks, dancing to music, making up nonsense rhyming words, dressing up, and pretending.

Functional Play

Also called exploratory play. A child learns the nature of his or her surroundings. Examples include dumping, filling, stacking, water play, and outdoor play.

Parallel Play

Children from 2.5 to 3.5 years old continue to play independently, but are now among their peers.

Solitary Play

Children play alone, usually with toys that are different from those of the children playing nearby.

Constructive Play

Describes children combining pieces or entities, such as with blocks. The purpose of this type of play is to make something and/or work out a problem.

Physical Environment

Designed and configured to enfluence how children feel, act, and behave.

Games with Rules

Distinguished by child-controlled rules and thus are different from the competitive games usually called "sports." Children begin the games with rules stage around 6.

Dramatic Play

Entails pretending. The child pretends to be someone else, for example the teacher or the fireman. This type of play does not require any social interaction with other children.

Implicit Rules

Maintaining the fantasy and reality distinction.

Cooperative Play

Takes place at around 4.5 years old. Children play in groups, now demonstrating division of labor, whether working on a group project or cooperating to attain a common goal.

Metalinguistic Awareness

The ability to reflect consciously on the linguistic operations and analytical orientations of language which generates literacy development.

Metacommunicative

The perspective of what people consider their cultural and personal reality, meaning that play and pretend are important for children's intellectual growth.

Environment

The physical environment, its surroundings, and a specific setting.