Advantages And Disadvantages Of Constructive Play

This review illustrates how children engage with different types of play; particularly constructive play and socio-dramatic play and how it enables them to develop through areas such as: social and emotional, physical and intellectual development. Constructive play can be defined as a goal-oriented play in which children use materials to create, sort and arrange in order to build something (Johnson et al, 2005). Wood and Attfield (2005) define Socio-dramatic play as the cooperation between at least two children in an ‘imaginary’ or ‘pretend’ world, where they interact roles and verbally communicate in them. It also provides an overview of the advantages and disadvantages to child-led and adult-led play; showing the dissimilar effects that

It involves rather complex and high concepts for children to understand; its complexity requires children to set the scene, make it understandable to others, use appropriate interaction with each character and provide methods of problem solving (Wood and Attfield, 2005). The work of Smilansky (1990) demonstrates the complexities in socio-dramatic play, these are: organisation, planning, integrating, reasoning and collaborating. Singer and Singer (1990) also claim that children develop areas of learning, such as: deeper language; divergent thought; self-entertainment; emotional expressiveness and self-awareness. Drummond and Pollard (1998) believe that the main area of learning whilst playing a role requires children to have enough intellectual knowledge about the appropriate behaviour of the role, which is being taken on; therefore children have to control themselves and learn new approaches to concepts. Children also use metacommunicative and metacognitive skills as they go in and out of play, according to Sawyer (2003), in order to clarify reality and pretend play. When children organise this type of play, they may recall what has happened previously, in terms of characters and plot. They must negotiate and communicate with each other in order to sort out the play frames and characters (Singer and Singer,

These situations may link to their own experiences or problems they are encountering with at that current moment in their lives. Glenn et al (2006) comment on the work of Sigmund Freud as he outlines the fact that, children show emotions through role-play or acting out stories. Socio-dramatic play enables children to pretend to be someone else, they can share their feelings and are able to confront problems and find solutions whilst using others in role. Socio-dramatic play provides an environment where children can cry if they want to and gives them a chance to develop sympathy or empathy for others. Children can get a feel for real life experiences, which in turn make it easier to handle these situations when they come across them in real life (Macintyre, 2012). Bhorin (2007) and Drummond and Pollard (1998) have shown that through the process of using ‘real’ life experiences in their socio-dramatic play, the children come to terms with their reality and make sense of their lives. Socio-dramatic play creates significant connections to the child’s life and gives them a way to express it by linking imagination with emotions. Bruce (1991) and Drummond and Pollard (1998) indicate that children are able to express experiences, thoughts, fears and ideas, within the safety of the enactment; this enables children to develop