Excerpted from Chapter 1 of Child's Play: Revisiting Play in Early Childhood Settings, by Elizabeth Dau, Dip. Teach., B.Ed.

Copyright © 1999 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cognitive development and play

Central to cognitive development is the capacity for symbolic thought, concept formation, and understanding complex relationships. In play, children have almost unlimited opportunities to develop their symbolic capacities and to symbolise things using materials in ways that are interesting and meaningful to them. Dramatic play, block construction and painting are all examples of activities in which children are able to use either themselves or objects and materials to stand for something else: a block is a very fast police car, a doll is the baby, the child is the mother, the yellow lines are the flowers, the block dots are the rain. This symbolism is the precursor of later, more complex, symbolic activity including reading and writing, in which children recognise that lines and forms stand for speech, concepts and ideas.

In play, children have opportunities to further their conceptual understanding and their understanding of relationships like shape, size, space, numbers, and measurement. When they play with objects they refine and extend their understanding of the quantitative qualities of objects — the size, shape and number of things — all of which are an essential part of mathematics. They learn, for instance, that four small blocks occupy the same space as one large one, or that two differently shaped containers hold the same amount — thus building new ideas onto what they already know and generalising their knowledge to apply to new and varied situations.

The skills which children learn to use as they play are, according to Levin, necessary prerequisites for later successful academic learning (Levin 1996). For instance, high quality play requires children to find content that is personally interesting to them to work on, containing new masteries to exercise, and new problems or questions to solve. As children persist in problem solving, they become creative thinkers, problem solvers, and risk takers.

Physical development and play

Play that requires use of the body gives children many opportunities to build their fine and gross motor control, enabling them gradually to gain more and more control over their bodies. Gross motor control is developed through activities that involve movement of the whole body or large parts of it, such as running, hopping, skipping, climbing, pushing, pulling and swinging. As children hope, skip and so on they use their existing gross motor skills to reach new levels of complexity, develop new skills and build their speed, endurance, balance and strength.

When children master a new skill, they enjoy it and practice it with glee, and it provides them with a wonderful sense of power and control. Children will often engage in the activity for long periods — walking along the beam balance over an over again, skipping everywhere or jumping from the deck repeatedly. Gradually, as they acquire prerequisite skills, they can master new skills that require complex coordination, such as riding a bicycle.

Fine motor control is developed through activities that involve the small muscles of the body and its extremities. As children pound clay, hammer in nails, draw patterns in the sand, cut with scissors and thread necklaces, their fine motor skills are refined and expanded with increasing dexterity and precision. Fine motor skills do not 'naturally' unfold — they are developed through exploration, experimentation and practice. That is, they are acquired as children actively engage with the world. As children play using fine motor skills they have already mastered, they encounter new challenges requiring new skills, which are in turn mastered through further play.