When a child is moving around, playing, learning about themself, and learning about the environment around them, the child is building their brain's infrastructure. It's important to stimulate children, to get them moving and interpreting the world through play and movement. We can do that by nurturing serve and return interactions, being responsive to their needs, or expanding their world knowledge through play.
The number of connections between brain cells and the quality of those connections is dependent on the experiences the child is exposed to. So, the more varied experiences a child encounters, the better they are able to build their brain.
In teaching, play is often seen as unproductive, wasted time and energy. However, research shows that appropriate play with parents, teachers, and peers is an amazing opportunity to promote the social, emotional, cognitive, language, and self-regulation skills that build executive function and a prosocial brain. Play has been categorized in many ways and there are a lot of different types of play. Let’s explore more about some of them.
Physical / Locomotor play
This type of play involves a wide range of movements such as running, jumping, throwing or kicking a ball, skipping, swinging, chasing, climbing, leaping, and riding a bike or scooter. These skills improve children’s balance, agility, flexibility, strength, and stamina. It also promotes a healthy lifestyle in children and strengthens their muscles, bones, and joints.Language / Communication play
This type of play involves words, phrases, facial expressions, gestures, sounds, and body language. Examples of this include playing with jokes, nonsense words, rhymes, impressions, songs, poetry, etc. All these things enable children to investigate and explore their language as well as develop their language comprehension and production.Exploratory play
This type of play involves exploring different objects and finding out information about them by manipulating them (like taking a toy apart and trying to fix it or finding out how a musical box works). It can involve interacting with lots of different environmental features, like trees, bushes, tunnels, unusual structures, bricks, places to hide or get off the ground, mounds, and ditches. During exploratory play, children use their senses to smell, touch, and even taste things.Constructive play
This type of play involves construction toys, like blocks, bricks, and magnetic tiles. Constructive play is important because it helps children develop their problem-solving skills, teaches them the importance of not giving up and trying again, and enhances their cognitive development. It also boosts their imagination and creativity.Fantasy play
This type of play allows children to pretend in ways that are unlikely to occur in real life (like being a superhero or being chased by a dinosaur). It helps them to express their emotions and deal with the novelties of their environment by trying out different roles and relationships. Fantasy play also helps children explore boundaries between reality and unreality, and encourages them to think outside the box.Social play
This type of play involves interactions with others (adults and peers) and exploring social rules (like creating a club or having meaningful conversations). Social play has a lot of benefits, like understanding customs and rules, gaining new knowledge, developing processing and social skills, practicing cooperation and compromise, helping children express themselves, as well as experiencing the power of relationships.Creative play
This type of play involves experimenting and creating with a wide range of different materials but is far more than just giving children access to art and craft materials. It can be expressed in many ways and combined with other types of play when needed. A range of things like straws, paper plates, pom poms, feathers, wool, fabric scraps, pencils, paints, brushes, and loose parts (like sticks, stones, pine cones, shells, acorns, leaves, driftwood) can give a child a lot of opportunities to reuse or recombine them to create anything they can imagine.Rough and Tumble play
This type of play allows children to take risks in a safe environment, which helps them gain the skills needed for communication, negotiation, and emotional balance and develop a physical awareness of themselves and others. It also encourages the development of emotional intelligence. It can include fighting, tumbling, or tickling. Rough and Tumble play is the most misunderstood type of play (adults very often misinterpret it as aggressive behaviour) and because of that very often prevented by parents and teachers.Outdoor play
This type of play provides the opportunity to improve sensory integration skills and it is important for a child’s physical health. Outdoor play activities involve the child as an active participant and is beneficial for developing fine and gross motor, cognitive, social, and linguistic skills.Object play
This type of play involves hand-eye manipulations of objects which allows children to gain an understanding of how those objects work (like looking at pine cones and investigating them from each side). This can provide an excellent opportunity for meaningful conversations and further exploration and discovery. It is also a great way to boost fine motor development and hand-eye coordination.Deep play
This type of play encourages children to take risks, challenge themselves, and face dangerous experiences (like riding a bike with no hands or balancing on a high beam). Deep play is probably the most challenging play type, but it has important benefits for children. It not only enables them to experience, manage, and overcome risk but also serves a deeper need to feel the thrill of being alive and having conquered their fears. Children will gradually engage in this type of play on their own terms.Dramatic play
This type of play involves recreating characters and plot lines drawn from the child’s environment and experiences (like pretending to eat at a restaurant or pretending to be a pop star). Making up their costumes, painting their faces, preparing essential props, choosing the right music, decorating a stage, and inviting their audience – all these things can characterize dramatic play. Dramatic play helps children develop turn-taking skills and cooperation. It is one of the most complex types of play.Symbolic play
This type of play involves using objects to represent other things (like using a stick to represent a sword or a round cushion to represent a wheel). Symbolic play helps children to develop the ability to use signs and the written word as well as their imagination, creativity, problem-solving skills, and adaptability.Mastery play
This type of play involves learning new skills and mastering them through control of the natural environment (like making a dam in a stream or building a bonfire). Often children repeat the same action over and over again until they master a new skill. It boosts children's confidence, gives them a sense of accomplishment, and helps them feel comfortable in their environment.Recapitulative play
This type of play involves engaging in rituals and exploring human history (like building a shelter or making and using weapons). It benefits children with a great connection to history and allows them to practice fundamental skills and instincts. The recapitulative play suggests that certain key behaviours are passed through our genes and are activated when children play in a particular way.
Every type of play supports children in building safe, stable, and nurturing relationships with parents and teachers. These are skills that all children need in order to thrive. Appropriate adult participation (and scaffolding) can be very beneficial for both adults and children because play influences all areas of development. Through playful exploration, children create new neural pathways, laying a solid foundation for their learning and growth.
References
Hughes B., 2002, A Playworker’s Taxonomy of play types, 2nd edition, PlayLink
Gordon Biddle K. et all, Early Childhood Education: Becoming a Professional, Chapter 10: Play and the Learning Environment, SAGE Publications (https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/53567_ch_10.pdf)
Lee S.H. at all, 2022, Development of a Social Play Evaluation Tool for preschool children, Healthcare, 10, 102 (https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10010102)
Yogman M. et all, 2018, The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children, American Academy of Pediatrics (https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2058)
E. Clabough, 2019, Second Nature. How parents can use neuroscience to help kids develop empathy, creativity, and self-control, Sounds True