Overview: In this exercise you have the opportunity to identify those activities you think can best be described as play.

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

Aim: to begin to clarify what play experiences children have in your setting during the course of a session.

Activity

Before making judgements about the value of play, it is important to be clear about how we define 'play'. Is play unstructured exploration of the immediate environment? Does participating in a board game count as play? Does a baby's exploration of a treasure basket count as play? Are children playing when they share rude jokes in the playground? Are children playing when they act out a scene from Roman life in a school assembly?

As an experienced practitioner, you will have an idea in your mind about what sorts of activities and experiences you would classify as play. Make notes during a session, or reflect on a recent session in your setting.

1. List the activities or experiences you feel were 'play'. Try to be as specific as possible. Instead of writing 'playing with cornflour and water', or 'playing with a geography simulation on the computer', write down exactly what the children seemed to be doing: 'exploring the texture and temperature of cornflour and water', or 'making decisions about where a village could be sited on an imaginary island so that its inhabitants could thrive'.
2. List the activities that most of the children appear to enjoy, but you would not classify as 'play'.
3. List activities that you would count as 'work'.
4. Look at the lists you have made and put an asterisk by any that you thought some or all of the children did not enjoy, seemed to be stressful, or included an element of frustration.
5. Look again at your lists. Have you used the same word or combination of words frequently? One student, for example, found that the word 'explore' cropped up frequently in her notes. Another noticed that he repeatedly used the word 'active'. From looking at your lists and thinking carefully about the way you have described the activities, write a short definition of what play means to you.

Scroll down for COMMENTARY on this exercise…

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Commentary

Play is extremely difficult to define. This, however, need not be problematic. What is important is that practitioners, parents and children within a particular setting share ideas about what constitutes play and that we, as adults, are clear about why we value play. Read through Why We Value Play for discussion of this point.

Now take another look at the activities you classified as 'play' in this exercise. Do you think they all fall into one category (e.g. activities concerned with cognitive development), or do they cover different aspects of play (e.g. children exploring roles, emotions, developing social skills)? Can you identify what you seem to value most about play?

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.