Pelletier – play-based program

I see a play based program as one that capitalizes on children’s natural curiosity, natural need to play. To engage in active exploration or maybe just fantasy play, but it capitalizes on what children do naturally. Good educators recognize that children need to play, and they set up environments that facilitate it. Play takes many forms. Play can be active outdoor play and some children will describe play in that way. They see play as climbing on the climber, chasing friends, that kind of thing. Other children will describe play in different ways, like playing in a dramatic play centre where they’re taking on roles and engaging in pretend play. Other children describe it as talking with their friends. So play takes different forms for different children, and all forms of play are important. 

Increasingly we’re seeing the real value of complex socio-dramatic play in terms of fostering children’s ability to regulate not only their behaviour but their emotions and their language, because in order to engage in this complex socio-dramatic play, they need to take the perspective of the other. They need to remember who is playing what role. They need to maintain the language that’s going to be of interest to their friends. And so good teachers will set up opportunities for children to engage in that kind of play. I think it’s also important to think about what children want or expect in say a full day kindergarten early childhood setting. Really, when they come into kindergarten, they’re big kids, and they might think that this is a time for them to do some work. So it’s not that they’re engaged in pretend play from morning until evening, it’s that teachers capitalize on their need to play, but they also know to infuse some sort of instruction whether it be paying attention to sounds, phonological awareness, but these can be done in enjoyable ways. It doesn’t have to be sitting down with pencil and paper and tracing and that kind of thing.  

So I really see play as being something that’s intentional on the part of the educators. That recognizes individual children’s understanding and need for play, and that sets up environments in which that can happen, and that teachers and early childhood educators know how to base their assessment on what children are learning in play.