What Is Personality?

Almost everyday we describe and assess the personalities of the people around us. Whether we realize it or not, these daily musings on how and why people behave as they do are similar to what personality psychologists do.

While our informal assessments of personality tend to focus more on individuals, personality psychologists instead use conceptions of personality that can apply to everyone. Personality research has led to the development of a number of theories that help explain how and why certain personality traits develop.

Components of Personality

While there are many different theories of personality, the first step is to understand exactly what is meant by the term personality. A brief definition would be that personality is made up of the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that make a person unique. In addition to this, personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life.

Some of the fundamental characteristics of personality include:

Consistency - There is generally a recognizable order and regularity to behaviors. Essentially, people act in the same ways or similar ways in a variety of situations.

·         Psychological and physiological - Personality is a psychological construct, but research suggests that it is also influenced by biological processes and needs.

·         Impact behaviors and actions - Personality does not just influence how

            move and respond in our environment; it also causes us to act in certain ways.

·         Multiple expressions - Personality is displayed in more than just behavior. It can also be seen in out thoughts, feelings, close relationships and other social interactions.

 

 

Theories of Personality

There are a number of different theories about how personality develops. Different schools of thought in psychology influence many of these theories. Some of these major perspectives on personality include:

·         Type theories are the early perspectives on personality. These theories suggested that there are a limited number of "personality types" which are related to biological influences.

        

·         Trait theories viewed personality as the result of internal characteristics that are genetically based.

       

·         Psychodynamic theories of personality are heavily influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, and emphasize the influence of the unconscious on personality. Psychodynamic theories include Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual stage theory and Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development.

          

·         Behavioral theories suggest that personality is a result of interaction between the individual and the environment. Behavioral theorists study observable and measurable behaviors, rejecting theories that take internal thoughts and feelings into account. Behavioral theorists include B. F. Skinner and John B. Watson.

     

·         Humanist theories emphasize the importance of free will and individual experience in the development of personality. Humanist theorists include Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.


Source- www.aboutpsychology.com 

What Are Children Learning When They Play

Circle Time
Generally teachers begin this group time with a specific topic for discussion. It may be a topic related to a project the class is working on, or it may focus on a specific skill. For example, in the beginning of the year, the teacher may play games to help the children learn the names of each of their classmates. Students may also use the time for "show and tell." Teachers often also include music appreciation, group sings, and creative movement during circle time.
Some teachers hold circle time first thing in the morning as a way of organizing the class and the morning activities.
What's Learned These "chats" are an opportunity for the youngsters to learn how to organize their thoughts. As they talk about their experiences, children learn how to tell a story with a beginning, middle,and end. When a child learns the words to "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" or "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly," this is an important part of a child's informal education. This is "shared knowledge"--that is information that society assumes you know. For example, other children assume you know the words to familiar folk songs.

Music Appreciation/Creative Movement
Children enjoy both listening to music and making their own. Whether it's a group sing-along, marching in a percussion band, playing a triangle, or making up new lyrics to old favorite tunes, music is the universal language. Creative movement, learning to move your body through space, in time to the music or while pretending to be a falling leaf, is a creative way to tap into a child's imagination and artistic side.
What's Learned Music helps children connect the outer world of movement and sound with the inner world of feelings and observations. Playing games or moving to music is a powerful first experience in theartistic process. Children learn music the same way they learn language--by listening and imitating.
Finger play promotes language development, fine-motor skills, and coordination, as well as self-esteem. Young children are proud when they sing a song and can do the accompanying finger movements.
Listening to music also teaches important prereading skills. As youngsters use small drums or other percussion instruments (homemade or store-bought), they can play the rhythmic pattern of words. They can learn to hear the differences between fast and slow, loud and soft, one at a time and together, etc. When they try new instruments, they notice how each variation changes the music.
Creative movement expands a child's imagination. It's also a fun method of physical fitness--an important goal of child development.

Art Projects
Some art projects are part of a theme that the class is studying. For example, as part of the seasons' curriculum, the children might gather pine cones, leaves, and acorns during a fall nature walk. They will later use them in art projects, such as to make leaf rubbings, to assemble in collages, or to use as decorations for picture frames.

A good art corner will be stocked with materials that can be used in a variety of ways for projects. There should also be easels for painting individually (although sometimes two children will work at the same easel to create a painting together).
What's Learned A good art project teaches a child that his creativity is limited only by his own imagination. By transforming everyday objects, such as empty paper towel rolls and egg cartons into sculptures, imaginary bugs, or spyglasses, a child discovers that he can create a world of play.
Using materials in an art project reinforces and expands on the information a child has already learned in other contexts. For example, let's assume that the art project of the day is to make rubbings of leaves collected during a nature walk the day before. If from a pile on the table, the child selects a dry leaf that crumbles easily, the youngster learns, in a concrete way, about life cycles in nature. Through trial and error, just like the scientist in a lab, the student might find that green leaves or shiny leaves hold up better for this art project.
Another art project might have the youngsters create a fall mural by pasting leaves, pine cones, and acorns on a large roll of paper. They might organize the project by sorting and classifying the leaves, by color, shape, and size. These are prereading and premath skills--as well as fun. In this same project, the group also learns social skills such as cooperative and group dynamics. Do the three-year-olds know this as they happily create a fall mural--probably not, but their teachers certainly do.
Art projects are also excellent for developing a child's fine-motor skills. It takes small-muscle control in order to manipulate clay, cut with scissors, paint with a brush, and color with markers or crayons. As these skills are practiced, they help a child gain mastery to cut with a knife, button his own shirt, and print his name.
Art projects build a child's self-esteem. The finished product, on display on the refrigerator, validates a child's sense of worth. It's another opportunity for a child to say "I can do it!"
The process, not the product, is the most important element of preschool art projects.

Outdoor Play
Running, swinging, climbing, jumping, hopping, biking, digging in the sand--outdoor fun is one of the favorite parts of any young child's day. A good preschool playground will have enough space and sturdy equipment that a child can use his imagination while exercising. For example, the jungle gym structure might have connecting slides, firefighter poles to shimmy down and then inch up, tunnels to crawl through, a swinging bridge that connects one side of the apparatus to the other. A child will use multiple skills and create dozens of scenarios as he plays on this one structure. There should be equipment for digging, hauling, building, and riding.
What's Learned Outdoor play refines a child's gross-motor (large-muscle) skills. The cross-lateral movement (right arm/left leg and vice versa) involved is critical to a child's later success in reading and writing. Playground time is also an opportunity to explore and manipulate a different environment.
Youngsters also love outdoor play because they can let loose their imaginations while getting physical. They can turn the jungle gym into a rocket ship, a castle, a firehouse--anything they choose.

Snack Time
What do you remember as the highlight of your own school day--lunch time and recess? It's not all that different for preschoolers.
Snack time is an important part of the preschool experience. Whether the food is provided by the school, or on a rotating basis by the parents, or cooked by the students themselves, snack time--just like mealtime in your own home--is an opportunity to "break bread," share, and communicate. The snack is usually simple, crackers or a piece of fruit and juice.
Snack time can also be an opportunity for children to try new foods. One little boy brought in the usual graham crackers and apple juice for the class snack, but also brought in his personal favorite green olives. Surprisingly, several of the children were willing to taste the new delicacy!
What's Learned Snack time is an opportunity for a child to learn social skills as she chats with her friend in the seat next to her. Passing out the snack and distributing a napkin and cup to each child teaches one-to-one correspondence and counting skills. Pouring the juice from a small pitcher to an individual cup requires small-motor control. Cleanup time after snack is another educational opportunity. Again, a child's sense of competence and independence are reinforced. Snack time is also an opportunity for a child toassociate mealtime with pleasant feelings.

Free-Play Activities

Free play sounds vague, but is very much a planned activity. The child has the freedom to choose among many different activities, but the teacher has created the classroom environment and arranged the choices the child will find. Free play is not time off for the teacher. On the contrary, she should be paying close attention to the children, interacting with them, offering guidance and help where necessary, noting progress and difficulties.
Here are some of the activities that a child may choose during the free-play period.

Building with Blocks
There's so much going on in the block corner that it's easy to understand why it is often the most popular area in the preschool classroom. It can also become the focus of incredible territorial struggles. Sometimes groups of children begin to act as if they own the space. Often boys dominate the area, making it difficult for girls (or boys who aren't members of the block clique) to enter. One study suggests that if a teacher positions herselfin the block corner for part of the day, girls are more likely to enter and use the area.
Building with blocks is lots of fun--and it teaches many skills that children will use later. One study indicates that many of the concepts learned from block building are the foundation for more advanced science comprehension. For example, a child learns about gravity, stability, weight, balance, and systems from building with blocks. Through trial and error, she learns inductive thinking, discovery, the properties of matter, and the interaction of forces. One researcher suggested that one reason you see fewer girls inadvanced placement physics classes in high school is because they are excluded (intentionally or unintentionally) from many of the "play" activities that build scientific framework.
What's Learned Blocks help children learn scientific, mathematical, art, social studies, and language concepts; use small-motor skills; and foster competence and self-esteem. Building with blocks also teaches life skills. Just putting away your groceries in the cupboard is using the same concepts of spatial relations, stability, and balance that you learned in the block corner.
Besides the scientific concepts discussed in the previous paragraph, blocks also are important in developing math skills. A child learns about depth, width, height, length, measurement, volume, area, classification, shape, symmetry, mapping, equality (same as), and inequality (more than, less than)--all from building with blocks.
Building with blocks also teaches art concepts such as patterns, symmetry, and balance. A child learns about symbolic representation, interdependence of people, mapping, grids, patterns, people and their work. A child gains prereading skills such as shape recognition, differentiation of shapes, size relations. Language is enhanced as children talk about how to build, what they built, what is its function or ask questions about concepts or directions. And dramatic play is also a part of block building as children create stories to go along with their constructions.
Finally, building with blocks fosters a feeling of competence, teaches cooperation and respect for the work of others, encourages autonomy and initiative.
It's not just building with blocks that is educational--so is cleanup. Sorting and storing blocks teaches classification and one-to-one correspondence, which are important math skills.

Dramatic Play
The housekeeping/dress-up corner should be stocked with play items and props that encourage young children to play make-believe. Look for pots and pans, stuffed animals, dolls (soft, unbreakable, washable, and multiethnic), toy telephones, hats, purses and tote bags, unbreakable tea sets, doll beds and carriages.
What's Learned Playing make-believe lets a child bring the complicated grown-up world down to size. Research demonstrates that children who are active in pretend play are usually more joyful and cooperative, more willing to share and take turns, and have larger vocabularies than children who are less imaginative.
Imaginative play helps youngsters to concentrate, to be attentive, and to use self-control. Think about how a child develops a game of supermarket. He must first set up the counter, put out the pretend cans of food, invite friends to shop, use the "cash register," and bag the groceries. All of these actions help a child to learn about sequential acts. He also has a story or script in mind that helps him to perform each of these steps in a logical and orderly way.
When children pretend they also learn to be flexible, substituting objects for those they do not have. For example, a child will use an empty paper towel roll for a telescope.
Through imaginative play, children learn empathy for others. Children will often act out a whole range of emotions when playing pretend, offering sympathy for a stuffed "doggie" that is hurt or for a doll that fell off a chair. We watch them scold a puppet for being naughty or tell a doll how proud they are because she used the potty.
Dramatic play encourages children to think abstractly, which is an important prereading skill. Children come to understand that words represent ideas.

Manipulative Toys
Children enjoy playing with a variety of toys that helps develop their fine-motor control. These toys include Legos, Bristle Blocks, Play-Doh, Peg-Boards, large beads to thread, and stacking and nesting materials.
What's Learned Manipulative toys help develop a child's fine-motor skills, which is a precursor to being able to write. Often these toys are also used in fantasy play. The beads that are strung become the necklace forthe "queen" to wear. The Play-Doh creations include cookies for the impromptu "tea party."

Cooperative Play
During the preschool day, you should see children who are playing by themselves, but you should also see cooperative play, small groups or even the class as a whole working on a project. The amount of cooperative play increases as the children grow older. Some of this play may be child initiated, and some may be teacher directed.
What's Learned Working together, whether it's on a block building or planning a tea party, helps children to learn to respect the ideas of others. They develop their social skills, and social competence is an underlying goal of early childhood education. Children in cooperative play learn to contribute to joint efforts. They also learn how to problem solve by working together to find a solution.
 
Sand/Water Table
Sometimes the rubber basin is filled with sand (some schools use rice or grits, which are less likely to get into a preschooler's eyes), and it's almost an indoor mini-playground. Even children who don't ordinarily dig in the sand at the beach will find it fun to measure, sift, and pour the sand from one container to another. When it's filled with water, the basin becomes a doll bathtub or a sink for toy china.
What's Learned A child has a practical math lesson in fractions when she pours a cup full of sand into a two-cup container. It explains the concept faster and more clearly than a detailed discussion or drawing. Her fine-motor skills are also being developed as she washes a tea set or maneuvers a cup full of sand into a sifter. Her eye-hand coordination is helped.
As anyone who has sat on a beach knows, sand and water play is soothing. It encourages children to explore and learn about cause and effect. (For example, what happens if I put a sponge in the water? What happens if I then squeeze the sponge?).
There is no right or wrong way to play with sand and water (except to throw it out of the basin), so each child experiences success.

Puzzles
The classroom should have puzzles that vary in complexity, five-piece puzzles, as well as 12-piece puzzles, and puzzles made of different materials. You should also find puzzles that interlock and those that have individual slots for pieces (for example, a five-piece puzzle of five individual animals).
What's Learned Puzzles require abstract thinking: the ability to see a space and envision what belongs there. Puzzles also require fine-motor control in order to place the pieces into place. Having puzzles for varied skill levels permits children at all stages of development to experience success.

Books
The book corner should have books reflecting a range of levels. There should be simple board books, as well as picture books with a story line. The area should be comfortable, carpeted, and perhaps lined with pillows. It should be a place where a young child can go and look through books by himself--as well as a meeting place for story time for the class.
What's Learned Children learn language skills from books. Whether they are looking at a book individually, or being read to as part of a group, when you make books a part of a young child's day you set the stage for a lifelong interest in reading.

Cleanup
Preschoolers don't yet know that grown-ups consider cleaning a nuisance. For them, it's another fun activity. It's not a question of efficiency. It's tempting sometimes for grown-ups to do the task themselves, rather than exercise the patience it requires to help a preschooler through a chore. But allowing the young child to put away the blocks, wipe down the tables, and put the toys back on the shelves is a valuable educational exercise.
What's Learned Preschoolers learn to sort, classify, match, and organize when they put the toys back on the shelf. A good preschool classroom will have low shelves and individual bins for small toys, so that the young child can easily see where objects belong. The bins will be labeled (which helps develop language skills).

Preschoolers learn that helping behaviors and orderliness are valued. They see that it's important to take care of their environment and that it's easier to find what you want when you put it back in its designated place. Cleaning up teaches self-discipline. Children learn how to follow simple directions. Working together as a class to clean up their room is another exercise in cooperation. As they work alongside their teacher and classmates, chatting and discussing the best way to approach the cleanup effort, language and social skills are being practiced. Preschoolers also enjoy feeling competent, independent, and responsible. With the instant feedback of a clean room and a job well done, a youngster's self-esteem is enhanced.

Blog For Parents

It's a blog on parenting for all the wonderful parents who do a good job... and who .. keep trying... Addressing issues in a warm, 'let's-get-together' kind of way. :)
http://imperfectparent101.blogspot.com
So please take a look.. send in comments.., questions, suggestions (on what topics you'd like, color, spelling :) , anything).
We'd really appreciate it... and try to include it. (Hoping to add some experts to the panel... so.. stay.)
 And yes, please forward to other parents, parents-to-be.
Hope to make some smiles and some relieved  sighs. 

Learning Through Play

As a child, I remember visiting friends who had LEGO®. The little interlocking bricks, with their precise engineering and clean lines, immediately appealed to me. I loved the tidy little houses with the opening doors and windows and smooth red roofs. Each birthday and Christmas I asked for LEGO only to be offered some other toy. I knew that one day I’d have children and they’d have LEGO!

“Toy” is a rather a demeaning description of this clever manipulative construction material. My dictionary defines toy as something meant for amusement rather than serious use. LEGO serves both purposes. It is a plaything and can amuse for many hours, but the real value in this children’s toy comes from the hidden learning quietly happening behind all the play.

Anyone who has visited our house can attest to our apparent addiction to LEGO, with our ever expanding collection of plastic bricks reaching mind boggling dimensions. When April turned three she received her first LEGO car and trailer, a set that is still in almost complete condition. A LEGO tractor decorated the centre of Roger’s first birthday cake. By four he could quickly assemble sets using instructions in less than half the time of kids twice his age. Thomas has never known life without LEGO. Their huge collection gave them greater diversity of play and model building. As they grew they became extremely selective, choosing sets that enlarged the usability of their collection.

Although I valued play as a major component of an educational curriculum, I never fully understood why play is such a powerful learning medium. For years I slotted in school-type learning activities into my children’s highly imaginative and constructive play, often interrupting the flow and disturbing the game. My subtle emphasis on what I considered to be a more valuable use of time undermined the value of play. It took me a long time to realize that my children, when playing, were actively engaged in a superior form of learning, effortlessly and efficiently teaching themselves things that would take many hours with contrived lessons.

Play with LEGO encouraged manual dexterity and good hand-eye coordination, and helped with classification and spatial skills. I watched the children move from solitary play, to parallel play and then to cooperative play. I heard April dictate play scripts for Roger, and, as his confidence and assertiveness grew, watched how he became more involved in the organization and structure of the games. Play allowed them to role play and assimilate, in non-threatening and controlled ways, disturbing incidents in their own life. They built amazing models and scenes which duplicated things they’d recently seen. I watched them stretch their imaginations to devise simple and complex machines, setting themselves tasks that challenged them into new cognitive thresholds. They worked hard to earn the money they needed to continue building their LEGO collections, thus learning many new skills in different areas.

Life was always imitated in play. After a trip on an historic tram, Roger built an intricate model, complete with platform, track and overhead rails. A town grew up around this model and a game was played for days. A tour aboard a ship produced several sailing ships, built without instructions, using memory and imagination. The ensuing game needed islands, fortresses and towns and lasted more than a week, with intense periods of concentration and play.

It’s easy to dismiss this activity as simply playing. However, a game of pirates was incomplete without frequent reference to the encyclopedia or books from the library on the subject, complemented by a trek down to the video shop. The movie The Mutiny on the Bounty sparked discussion about Australian history; another model soon appeared, and Cap’n Roger became William Bligh. The children made swords from plywood; fierce battles were fought on and around the newly decorated cubby, an imaginary sailing ship. The technology and work skills used in such games goes well beyond the initial manipulation of little plastic bricks.

The most elaborate LEGO houses have adorned April’s floor. We began building our home a few months before her birth, and haven’t stopped building since. So it’s no wonder that April is an expert at LEGO house construction! It was a lovely surprise to arrive home one day to find she had built a to-scale model of our home, complete with furniture. Plans are integral to the building process. A model of a carnival, complete with Ferris-wheels and rides, resulted in a collection of maps and drawings, just in case they wanted to build it again.

As the children grew, model building replaced the more playful aspects of LEGO. The children stopped using their models to play games where characters live in a fantasy world and have adventures. But even at the age of 16, Roger still indulged his younger brother in such imaginative play. I was impressed by this social skill, one often lost by kids this age group keen to get on with more “adult” past-times. More than the others, Roger has used LEGO as a learning platform. He surprised us all with a prize-winning LEGO mural of a female face a month after seeing an exhibition where several decorative murals were displayed. Far from being a construction toy, LEGO for Roger was a tool to produce Art. In his teen years, he turned his attention to Technic and programmable LEGO. His interest in electronics and computer technology demonstrated the effectiveness of LEGO as a foundation for the skills regularly used while fixing clients’ computers. Quietly, behind the scenes and unobserved, Roger’s play with tiny plastic bricks prepared him for a technical career.

With hindsight, it’s easy for me to see where LEGO helped to develop my children’s skills and understandings in each of the areas prescribed by the education system. They developed social skills through learning cooperative behaviors, organizing their time, developing decision making and problem solving skills, evolving communication skills to suit need and situation, both in familial situations and with friends. They exercised and developed information skills: the ability to find information from many sources in effective and efficient ways, learning to ask and pose questions, to choose strategies for locating information and to use it in an organized way.

This gave them an incredible body of knowledge about their favorite toy, but also spun out into other areas of learning, enriching their lives immeasurably. LEGO construction developed planning and design skills, as well as the ability to initiate and interpret ideas, test solutions to problems encountered or imagined, and evaluate the final construction. From the initial desire to build something to the final breaking-up stage, the children actively used complex planning and design skills, often mapped out their models on paper first, and frequently recorded instructions in order to build them again. Their acquired confidence, fine motor control and manual dexterity were demonstrated in other areas, especially craft projects. And I can’t begin to list the mathematical skills and concepts the children absorbed through their play with LEGO.

Although I consciously selected toys I knew would have some educational benefit, I was unaware of how play would teach my children those things I believed could only be learned from contrived activities or textbooks. More than any other toy, LEGO has shown me the value of play.

Play isn’t something that we, as adults, can manipulate and control. Our role, as I have found out, is to facilitate as many opportunities for play as we can. Aside from quality tools, time to play is crucial, and that's something home educating families can give their children in abundance.

by Beverley Paine

  

Understanding Child Behavior and the Root-Causes of Challenging Behaviors

As time permits, when you are observing your child’s challenging behaviour and it doesn’t require an immediate response, we recommend reviewing the “3 Reasons for Challenging Behaviour” to help you think before you react to your child’s challenging behaviour.

We want you to be “thinking” and not “reacting” to your child’s challenging behaviours. We know that you love your child deeply and that you want to help resolve your child’s challenging behaviours. Our goal is to help you “think” as clearly as possible on how to best assist your child.

This developmental framework lays out for you a clear means to assess and then respond to your child’s challenging behaviours.

Knowing the “3 Reasons for Challenging Behaviour” is key in really understanding what assistance and support your child needs.

So look and listen before you act. Practice non-reaction in order to gather awareness of what your child is doing and thinking about, and what might be causing the behaviour. Once you have awareness about the real reasons behind your child’s challenging behaviour, you’ll be able to help your child resolve their behaviour at the roots.

And, as we previously mentioned, fixing the foundation of the issue is the only way to provide your child and your family with a long-term and permanent resolution to your child’s behaviour.

3 Reasons for Challenging Behaviour


1. Your child has a legitimate need that is not being met, such as food, water, attention, closeness, sense of belonging, respect, rest, affection, exercise, stimulation, learning, etc.
2. Your child doesn’t have enough information or understanding about a situation. He may be too young to understand or remember a rule. Therefore he may need more communication or education about it.
3. Your child may have an accumulation of stress from the past, and therefore is unable to think clearly. He may be experiencing strong emotions, he may be scared, angry, resentful, disappointed, insecure, etc.
Ask yourself these three questions in order to break free from reactive parenting and respond more intelligently to your child by understanding the real reason why he is exhibiting undesirable behaviour. 


1. Does my child have an unmet need ? 
2. Does my child lack information, or is he too young to understand or remember a rule?
3. Is there an accumulation of stress?

The Value of Unstructured Free Play By Carlo Ricci

When I was a child, adults played a significant part in our play by allowing us to do it without interference. Unfortunately, this child-structured play is increasingly being replaced by adult-organized, controlled and supervised play.

When I was young, I would simply tell my parents that I was going out here or there and the rest was up to me and my friends. Having to create our own play challenged our creativity and imagination. We had to decide what we wanted to do and we had to make it happen. Sometimes, this took a lot of organizational skills.

Playing hockey was an ongoing logistical and organizational process that forced us to be creative and imaginative. We spent months scouring the neighborhood looking for materials that we could use to make the equipment that we needed. We would enthusiastically ride our bikes looking for foam to make goalie pads. We would go to the local arenas and look through the trash bins for sticks that were salvageable. We made our goal nets out of plumbing pipe and meshing that the arena threw out and that we learned to patch.

We organized a hockey league, with teams made up of children who lived on different streets. We named ourselves the Major Street Devils because we lived on Major Street. We made sure that on game day each team would wear the same colored tops. Some teams created their own jerseys. We scouted several locations that were best suited to play hockey, where the ball would remain in play within a confined area and we would not spend the whole game chasing it. We were not bound by adult- controlled, rented space and time limits. We decided for how long we wanted to play. At times, we would just play until we no longer wanted to play; at other times, we played until we reached a certain tally of goals. Once we reached that number, someone would inevitably shout, “five more goals,” or “let’s play again” and we did. Our only limit was the disappearance of the sun. We often played until we could no longer see the ball, and sometimes we played even when we could no longer see the ball. We were largely bound by our own rules.

Most of today’s children don’t make pads and nets. Instead, their parents buy them from for-profit businesses. Then they don’t even organize their own hockey games, but join an organized league where everything is decided for them. It’s as if those of us who created our own unstructured free space as children continue to do it as adults, but this time not for ourselves but for our children. In the process, what are we depriving them of?

I am not suggesting that adults and children should not play together. What I am suggesting is that adults can join the play but they should not control it. I know a woman who is so skilled at playing with children that children swarm her whenever she is around. Every child wants to play with her, because she has retained what most of us have lost: the ability to play. At gatherings, she seems to prefer playing with the children, rather than interacting with the adults. But she doesn’t control the play; she listens, follows, contributes and participates in the play with the children. She becomes a part of the group.

That is not what happens most of the time. And it’s not what happened when my wife and I enrolled our eldest daughter in a gymnastics program. The day that I took her to her class, I was impressed by the quality of equipment that was available for her to play with. I was excited and thought that this was going to be fun for her and for me. However, the fun ended when the adult instructor entered the room. There was nothing wrong with her; in fact, she was a very pleasant and charismatic woman. She was simply doing what she believed she needed to do, which was to teach. Unfortunately, “to teach” has become synonymous with “to control.”

This particular teacher started by asking all of the children to gather around her for a warm-up activity. The activity was inappropriate and teacher-centered. It was inappropriate because it was clear that this was not what the children wanted to do. What ended up happening was that the parents were behind their children like puppeteers and the children were being “marionette” to follow the teacher’s lead. The parents tried to bribe, cajole and manipulate their children to comply, mostly without success.

I quickly realized that I could not be an accomplice to this and so I politely allowed my daughter to rescue us. We ended up having as great a time as we could in an environment where people thought that our removing ourselves from the group was inappropriate and gave us stares and made comments to indicate that. For example, they would share with their children in a voice that was loud enough for me and my daughter to hear that going off on your own and playing with the equipment is not acceptable and that their children should stay with the group and follow the teacher. So their children stood in lines waiting to use the equipment, resembling disinterested parts going through an assembly line. Although the children often resisted, the parents quickly rallied them back and forced them to continue along the line. I was left wondering what had happened to the excited bunch of children that I saw playing with the equipment in creative and imaginative ways before the class started. The imposed structure just sucked the life right out of them. Even though there was so much equipment, everyone had to share the same piece, which resulted in them spending most of their time standing around waiting for their turn.

My daughter and I got to play with all of the equipment except for the trampoline. The teacher warned us to stay away from it without her direct supervision. Fortunately, as most children soon find out, beds make great trampolines and so my daughter plays on our bed as if she is on a trampoline. Although she is no longer in gymnastics, she continues to play acrobatically on her own and with her friends. She can somersault, do cartwheels and plays with the equipment at the local park.

When we finally signed her up again for lessons, we were amazed at how different she was in a structured class environment versus playing on her own. She enjoyed being around the instructor, but her comfort level and skill development had nothing to do with the lessons and everything to do with her self-initiated unstructured play. Clearly, learning how to swim requires this sort of play, rather than obedience to others’ directions.

I would like to share one more example. This same daughter recently turned three and we had a party for her at a local grocery store where the children made their own pizzas and decorated their own cakes. During this activity, some of the parents took over the pizza making and cake decorating to create beautiful looking cakes…except that the point of the party was to have the children enjoy cooking, rather than to watch their parents. Even more curious was that the other parents were looking at me as if I was a negligent parent for not showing my daughter how to do it “right” and for not doing it for her so that it looked “proper.”

When we first entered the party area, there were balloons scattered on the floor. As the adults huddled along the walls, the children enthusiastically engaged in creative and imaginative play with the balloons. But it was the facilitator’s job to run activities. As soon as this pleasant and personable woman began to interfere, the children’s play was stifled. She tried to control what they did, tried to lead structured activities and set limits to where children could roam, attempts that were ignored by the children. Thinking I would rescue both her and the children, I politely offered for her to let them be. Once she did, the noise level went up and the children were once again enthusiastically initiating play – something they do naturally, without our help. Children know how to play and will learn from that play…if only adults who have forgotten how can stop interfering with their enjoyment, creativity and imagination.   

Play is Self-Directed Learning

A few years ago I helped a ten-year-old boy at the beach build a dam across a little stream. I was helping my teacher husband with a class field trip. At the end of each school year, he takes his class to the beach. This particular year, the lake he usually goes to had a lot of algae so instead of going there, he took his class to a beach by the ocean. We live in Victoria, B.C. While the air gets warm, the Pacific Ocean never gets much warmer than about 12 or 13 ° C in the summer. So instead of swimming, the children often build sandcastles or climb around on and/or build things with the logs that have been washed ashore.

One of the boys wanted to build a dam across a stream quite a way down the beach from where the group was. He needed an adult to go with him, so I volunteered. I found it fascinating to be with this child as he built his dam. He had lived in Victoria for most of his childhood. One of the best things about Victoria is that there are many accessible beaches that have lots and lots of driftwood. I watched as Hayden (not his real name) carried various pieces of wood to his dam location and started building. I asked if he wanted help to carry more driftwood. He said sure. Soon we exhausted the supply that was light enough for us to lift.

Hayden then decided that he needed a bigger log. He tried to move a log that was almost two meters long and 16 or 17 cm across. He tried tugging at it. He tried pushing it from one side. He tried pushing it from the ends but it was too heavy for him to move. I offered to help, but he wanted to work on his own. After 10 minutes, I offered to help again. He accepted my help then and I suggested that he use a long, thin log nearby to put underneath the bigger log to pry it up and move it that way. He thought this was a great idea and soon he was using the pole as a lever. It took him a while to get the hang of it, but he kept trying and soon began to figure out how the pole could help him move the bigger log to where he wanted it to go.

I was pleased for him that he had time to explore the possibilities of a lever. At the same time that I was pleased, I was sad. Here was a child who had not had the chance to spend enough time just poking around on the beach to discover that you can use one log to pry up another one. It made me think about how many times I was asked how my children could possibly be learning anything if they were just playing all the time.

This experience on the beach epitomized for me why children need to have time to play in unstructured ways. It helped to validate that self-directed play is a vital component of learning. Children need to explore the world and experiment to really begin to understand how things work. They need many experiences of rolling down a hill, rolling a ball down a hill, watching water from a hose run down a hill, seeing streams run down hill, etc. to grasp what gravity means. It is from experience that we build understanding and knowledge.

Current learning theory states that learning is:

·a process of knowledge construction, not of knowledge recording or absorption;

·knowledge dependent, as people use their existing knowledge to construct new knowledge;

·affected as much by motivational issues as by cognitive ones;

·highly tuned to the situation in which it takes place.

Children learn about arithmetic in much the same way – with hands-on experience of objects like dolls or rocks or Lego pieces as they play. Parents give a child words and concepts, but it is the manipulating, the sorting and tactile experiences that make sense of number concepts. Until a child has his or her own understanding of these number concepts, has built this knowledge internally and understands it, arithmetic problems may feel like Sara did when she was trying to figure out why the Play-doh didn’t go back in where it came out. Until a child has had many experiences with quantities of items and manipulated them, the process of addition, subtraction, multiplication can look as mysterious to them as the problem Sara had figuring out the Play-doh extruder.

When my children were young, it was in their fantasy play that I observed them using all kinds of objects, materials and ideas that led to knowledge and understanding. They played for hours, both indoors and out. They dressed up in costumes, built forts and tents, created towns both life-size and in miniature in which to enact their spontaneous play. Their fantasy plays sometimes continued over many days, as they returned to a certain setting they had created, and sometimes it was a very short thing.

This time to play gave them a background of experiences to draw on as they grew older. They learned how to create situations and how to make choices that fit into the situations they had created. They learned to do practical things like how to hammer nails into wood so that a fort would stay together or how to sew something so that it stayed together. If they wanted finger puppets to enact a story, they made them. I was there to give some basic instruction and then watched and helped as needed.

Living and learning at home allows families to create time and safe places for children to play. Children can take advantage of the time at home to build Lego structures that can take days to build and perfect, create a fort in the living room to play in if it’s raining outside, spend hours swinging or engage in any number of other activities limited only by their imaginations. As they play, they learn many things – some that are measurable and some that are not. As stated in learning theory, learning is affected as much by motivational issues as by cognitive issues and it is highly tuned to the situation in which it takes place. When a child is engaged in play, learning is something that happens as part of the experience. It is not directed by someone else but self-directed by the child.

This opportunity to be self-directed – to make decisions about what to play with and how to play – will help in later life. Decisions about which of the Playmobile pieces to play with and sorting them out accordingly can lead to an ability to organize and priorize. Unlike artificially divided subjects, play covers the entire learning spectrum – for example from biology (learning which berries are OK to   eat) to sociology (how many people are needed to make a village fantasy game work.) Self-directed, spontaneous fantasy play gives children an opportunity to interact and make decisions the way adults make them in life. What could be more educational than that?

Source-

http://www.childsplaymagazine.com