Child Directed Play Essay

Early years setting such as Rainbows End Nursery follows a curriculum made for all early years settings therefore for the setting there are legal requirements that they have to meet. These include the requirements for young children to carry out most of their learning throughout play and play based activities. Likewise this links towards gaining knowledge from play towards their five areas of development; social, emotional, physical, cognitive, language and communication. For example filling up jugs with different measurements will allow the children to improve within their mathematics with these materials to understand concepts such as ‘full, empty, half full etc.

Although both child-initiated and adult directed play activities are very important

for children to progress and develop within all the curriculum areas. The balance between both of these also needs to reflect on both the age and stage of development for each child. Children who contain particular learning needs are likely to need more adult directed play to be able to learn and complete the given activities with help. Likewise, it is known that older children also benefit more through adult directed play due to them needing to learn the curriculum and develop their understanding of mathematics and literacy therefore they need to be taught all the different concepts.
On the other hand, there are many skills that are needed towards adult-directed play and activities. Starting with plan and play activities that are carefully linked towards the particular age the children and their stage of development. This is important to engage children to their needs without them getting frustrated with it being too hard or too easy.
While the role of adults is to introduce new toys, resources and activities and at times build on each of the children’s interests to keep them engaged while learning. While also observing each and every child’s reactions to the new activities, resources and toys to find out in particular what they find enjoyable and interested or if they dislike it as they lack in concentration. This is essential to benefit children’s development.
Conversely the key to engaging children during child-directed play is that ownership and direction of the play stays with the children.

For example if a child is building a building block tower the adult should not come across and suggest them to build something else. To support child- directed play the adult has to observe what the child/ children are doing and stand or sit near them although they are not able to interfere. Therefore if the adults do disturb the children by interfering it will make them become less confident and lack in self-esteem due to the fact that an adult has interrupted and told them to do something different. This makes the child feel that they have done something wrong therefore they will lack in trying new ideas again for themselves, in case they feel they do it wrong this works out as a disadvantage for all five areas of development for this particular child. Whereas an adult also has to act interested and praise the children instead of lowering their self-esteem. For example saying ‘wow that is a big tower I wish I could do that, well done’. This allows the child to feel good about them and often they will go back to building one again another day as they feel that they did well and what to do good again to be praised more. Although if the adults lack in getting interested within the task and not praising the child when they build something alone for example the child will begin to feel that they are not happy as they feel alone at school due

to playing alone and no one noticing. Therefore this can make the child not want to come to school.