When toddlers play, they subtly adjust the way they play to the play of their friends to keep the play going – an early indicator that they understand how others are feeling. Yet the ability to play with other children is just emerging – and needs support and encouragement from the trusted adults in their lives. Toddlers are fascinated by other children and find watching their activities highly engaging and entertaining. Toddler play can be remarkably sophisticated and provides us with insight into their thinking. In fact, it is repetition that helps children understand and remember what they learned and recall and use it later. Although older toddlers are very interested in what other children are doing, much of toddler play is done alone, even if the classroom is full of children. They pick up on others’ play ideas to make them uniquely their own. They may use one object to serve as another, get distracted from what they are playing when they discover a new prop or toy, or stop to watch others in mid-play. This play isn’t as recognisable as the socio-dramatic play of preschoolers.
They play in the moment, with the ideas that come to them from their experience or the environment. Toddlers are very capable of playing with intensity and creativity but the way they play is different from older children. What do these ideas mean to those of us who work with toddlers? First of all, it helps us understand that toddler play is different. Applying theories of play to everyday life Play, particularly make believe play, creates a ZPD as the child plays. He is known for the idea of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which is the range of tasks a child can do with help but cannot do on their own. Vygotsky's sociocultural theory says that children socially construct what they know by using language. Parents and early childhood teachers see mostly parallel and associative play with their toddlers although cooperative play emerges for most children by the end of this period. In this stage, children cooperate with others to create play situations, with each child in the group playing an assigned role.
Cooperative play is the final, and most sophisticated, form of play. In associative play, children play with each other, but there is no particular goal or organisation to their play. Parallel activity emerges next, with children playing side by side with similar toys – next to each other, but not with each other. During solitary independent play, children play alone with objects without interacting with others even when they are near. Mildred Parten’s stage theory describes the ways children interact with each other. They develop a sense of themselves as independent from their parents and caregivers and use play to explore being like these important people, as well as to experiment with being very different from them. When children move on to symbolic play, they begin to recreate in their play the things they see in the world around them. When a baby plays peek-a-boo, hiding his face behind a blanket, over and over again, this is practice play.
Practice play, the most common type of play during the first years of life, is composed of repetitions of the same movements and actions, both with and without objects. Piaget divided play into three types of “play behaviour” – practice play, symbolic play, and play-with-rules. They describe play in different ways, but each one is useful for understanding the play behaviour you see in your classroom. There are three theorists who are especially important to our understanding of play – Jean Piaget, Mildred Parten, and Lev Vygotsky.
Self-directed play can be active (running round the playground on a bike path), quiet (looking at a book or cradling a doll), or a combination (trying on Dad’s shoes and trying to walk in them). This decline worries early childhood teachers, as play is often seen as integrative – offering children opportunities to try on new behaviours to see how they fit and then to add these behaviours to their skill repertoires. The amount of time children spend in uninterrupted self-directed play – when no one is teaching them, when they are free to decide what and how to play – has declined tremendously in educational settings and in the home lives of children. During toddlerhood, children are exploring the world around them, learning about themselves and others, building language and literacy skills, and learning to regulate their behaviour. In fact, we often determine where children are developmentally by watching them play. Children’s play tells family members and early childhood teachers so much about development.
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