Creative play is like a spring that bubbles up deep within a child. Joan Almon
It is in play, and only in play, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. D.W. Winncott
Support for play
Growing up in such a large family there was always someone to play with. My mother encouraged free play. She would often join in on the silly, creative forms of play our imagination desired. Whether it was thinking of the woods as a journey to finding treasure, playing princess (yes, my brothers played princess with me), or it was creating forts the size of our living room. While I never thought about it then, these were all ways my parents supported play as a learning opportunity. It was a chance to develop our problem solving skills, cognitive, and motor skills. One similarity I see between play when I was a child and play is the amount of enjoyment children get from it. However, the difference is the amount of play we see. While many of the same materials we used for play still exist, we often are not seeing them used. Imagination is quickly becoming an unknown concept. Video games, Internet, television, and other electronic equipment are taking away the very powerful learning opportunities free play provided. While I do not feel all of these new, popular toys are bad, I do feel it is eliminating an outstanding opportunity to children to think on another level and use more cognitive thinking skills than these new toys are requiring. My hope is that as time goes on, the desire for electronic games would decrease and the desire to explore nature’s learning environment would increase. By embracing the imagination and creative play, we may find that the mastery of academic skills we are pushing will become quiet easier, for Almon (2002) does tell us that a link exists between play and learning. We don’t often think about adults and play together, but play does have an impact on us as adults. Play provides the foundation on which we build all other knowledge and skills. It is one of the first learning opportunities we have to “think outside of the box”; something we all do as adults.
Growing up in such a large family there was always someone to play with. My mother encouraged free play. She would often join in on the silly, creative forms of play our imagination desired. Whether it was thinking of the woods as a journey to finding treasure, playing princess (yes, my brothers played princess with me), or it was creating forts the size of our living room. While I never thought about it then, these were all ways my parents supported play as a learning opportunity. It was a chance to develop our problem solving skills, cognitive, and motor skills. One similarity I see between play when I was a child and play is the amount of enjoyment children get from it. However, the difference is the amount of play we see. While many of the same materials we used for play still exist, we often are not seeing them used. Imagination is quickly becoming an unknown concept. Video games, Internet, television, and other electronic equipment are taking away the very powerful learning opportunities free play provided. While I do not feel all of these new, popular toys are bad, I do feel it is eliminating an outstanding opportunity to children to think on another level and use more cognitive thinking skills than these new toys are requiring. My hope is that as time goes on, the desire for electronic games would decrease and the desire to explore nature’s learning environment would increase. By embracing the imagination and creative play, we may find that the mastery of academic skills we are pushing will become quiet easier, for Almon (2002) does tell us that a link exists between play and learning. We don’t often think about adults and play together, but play does have an impact on us as adults. Play provides the foundation on which we build all other knowledge and skills. It is one of the first learning opportunities we have to “think outside of the box”; something we all do as adults.
