Imaginative Play Case Study

Play is instrumental in the healthy development of children. The development of play throughout an individual life is essential in providing the necessary methods to foster growth and development in critical developmental areas. According to Davies (2011), play is instrumental in providing a bridge for the child to transition from a toddler with a limited capacity to understand the world into a child in the middle years who can think logically. Play is also important in fostering cognitive development, social development, language and communication, moral development, self-regulation, and sense identity.
First, during infancy, the development of relationships, cognitive abilities and growing interests in the external world can be seen while

More specifically, imaginative play is very important during this stage of development because it serves as a means of understanding the world. For example, imaginative play allows the child to comment and try to understand reality via an imaginary world that the child can control and manipulate. This in turn, allows the child to express their feelings in a pretend scenario without receiving the same responses if expressed in reality. As a result, this assists the child in the understanding of emotions and perspective thinking because during imaginative play, the child expresses strong emotions and must empathize with each other’s ideas and feeling (Davies,

For example, play such as climbing, skipping, running, and hopping assist in the development of the child’s gross motor skills. Similarly, cutting with scissors, and drawing assist in the further development of the child’s fine motor skills (Davies, 2011). In addition, play is instrumental in social development. Preschool children learn values of prosocial behavior such as comforting, helping, controlling aggression, and sharing via cooperative play. For example, turn taking is an important aspect of play that fosters sharing, moral reasoning, control of aggression, and conflict resolution because it is an essential aspect to the child’s establishment friendships and maintenance of relationships (Davies, 2011). Consequently, because friends spend more time playing together, they have more conflicts but are more likely to negotiate a solution. Ultimately, because of the child’s desire to be accepted and valued by peers, conflicts become opportunities for the child to learn how to, control aggression, share, and resolve