Play Based Learning's Importance

On the surface of children's games, you see the interaction and playfulness of their gestures.  What you don't always understand are those innate drives and compulsions fuelling that play.  That insistent mechanism to engage with, process and understand the world around them.

Play is a child's best work.  It lays down the fundamental, experiential groundwork of what it is to be human.  It does this on many levels.  Physically, emotionally, socially, spiritually and intellectually, play enriches and extends all of these capacities.  It also takes up a space where time and consciousness can move as a collective force.

Now that may seem a strange statement but think back to those times as a child where you participated socially in a group and the play became seamless and the need for words disappeared and the play could continue over days.  An easy comfortableness descends and purposeful engagement arises.  A meditative balm for the soul.  This is the kind of play we want young children to experience.  Not play dominated by commercial programs marketed to take hostage of children's imagination, creativity and play.

I see over and over again the negative impacts of popularised tv shows and movies.  It very effectively takes over a child's play and then there is little deviation or appropriation from the child.  Characters from films are fixed, impersonal and often so abstracted from the genuine warmth of real human interactions that a child cannot understand or process so then plays this fixed game ad nauseum.  There is little personal growth and development in this.

What small children need is time and space to be bored, to experience challenges and adversity and work to overcome them.  Play is the best form of growth and development for children.  We need to protect this form of play.  Our world is increasingly busy and so hurried that most of us are so disconnected from ourselves that maybe we don't see the negative effects screens and technology are having on our children.

Let's support each other in an act of defiance where we disengage from technology, become more present and create many opportunities for self-directed play-based growth for our children.