Overview: In this exercise you will try to gain and understand children's perspectives on play.

Time: You should allow 2 hour(s), 0 minute(s).

Aim: to develop your understanding of how children view play and children's and adult's perceptions of play.

Activity

You will need to choose one or two children in your setting, perhaps a girl and a boy, to explore their views on play. To find the answers to the following, and other, questions, you may find that you are using various approaches, such as child conferencing, children’s own photographs, tours and maps. Think carefully about the questions you ask.

If you are working with very young babies, you may need to talk to significant adults. Again, think carefully about questions to ask, and where and when you intend to interview the adults.

Questions to explore could include:

• When can you play in the setting?
• Who do you play with?
• What do you play?
• Where do you play?
• Why do you play?
• Do adults play with you?
• Do you think that adults think that playing is important?
• Do you learn anything from playing?

Finding out what children think about the learning experiences and activities we offer them, including play, is an important aspect of listening to children. This may lead us to question assumptions and beliefs that we have about the value of play and whether children feel that that their play experiences are meaningful and worthwhile. In the next section we explore some of the

Discussion

See What Play Means to Children for further discussion of this topic.

Acknowledgement

This exercise is adapted from The Open University’s OpenLearn (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) material entitled The role of play in children's learning – made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. As such, it is also made available under the same licence agreement.