“Work is play”: This is what two among the 7 important contributors and founders of early childhood education in India, Friedrich Froebel and Maria Montessori famously said about what play is – when it is seen through the eyes of a child.
It therefore becomes a crucial responsibility for the adults to learn about the 16 different types of play in early childhood, and nurture children through play. The learning is critical, especially from the perspective of how play can and help them grow across all three major domains of development: Physical, Cognitive and Pshycho-Social.
So let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
Active Play
Children engaged in active play are always enthusiastic, full of energy, and engage their whole body during play. They participate in all aspects during play, engaging all their five physical senses namely vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste.
When children grow up by regularly engaging in active play during early childhood, they learn social negotiation, which in turn helps them grow up to be fairly cooperative throughout their lives.
Apart from developing a friendly attitude towards others, some of the benefits enjoyed by children who engage in active play include opportunities to develop their social values, communication skills, social skills, and a sense of sharing, among others.
Example of Active Play
Jai is a five-year-old active player playing with his toy car by dragging it back and forth. In order to interact with his friend, he narrates a story and also shares his toy car, so that he can keep the interaction going and develop a new friendship.
While being actively engaged in play, Jai is developing his communication, social skills and sense of sharing. He also learns how to approach his peer member in a friendly manner and sow the seeds for a new relationship.
Passive Play
Passive play is play where children are not involved in active physical movement and active personal involvement. Instead, they watch the others play and observe things like:
- How they are playing?
- How they use language during play?
- How they behave during situations? and
- How they are using their intelligence during play?
While children do learn through passive play too, what is critical to keep in mind is that they should not be allowed to engage in passive play for long periods of time – especially by just watching screens. Studies indicate that too much screen time can easily develop lazy behaviour in them, and could also lead to communication related difficulties as they grow up.
Example of Passive Play
A four-year-old child watching his elder brother playing cricket as a spectator is one example of passive play. Here the child is a passive player, and observes the way how the elder brother is playing, what are the movements he makes with the ball or bat, how he reacts to normal and tense situations, etc.
Constructive Play
Also called: Manipulative Play
When children succeed in bringing an idea they have in their mind into reality, or if they create something from their own original idea, they are said to be involved in constructive play. This is a kind of play which gives them the best opportunity to enhance their creativity and do whatever they can to bring it into reality.
Children thoroughly enjoy this kind of play, because this is the most realistic opportunity they are given to explore and experiment what they have learned, test their creativity and give life to their ideas.
One of the best aspects of Constructive play is that children get to work on a range of things like eye-hand coordination, refinement of fine motor skills, and most important of all, their basic engineering skills. This play also involves manipulative play, where they make use of their fingers to grip, tear or screw any of their play items.
Constructive play, in combination with manipulative play, allows children to be creative, express themselves, and often extend themselves to other forms of play such as fantasy play or make-believe play.
Types of Constructive Play
Constructive play is of two types:
a) Instructive play
Instructive play is a kind of play where the materials meant for play will have instructions about how to go about playing the game. Since they involve instructions, this kind of play is played by children who can read and follow instructions.
b) Non-instructive play
Non-instructive play is any play that does not involve any instructions and revolves around making use of simple materials such as blocks, paints, paper, scissors, sand, water, etc.
Benefits of Constructive Play
Constructive play helps children to develop their linguistic skills, since it introduces them to learning new vocabulary in the form of instructions found within the play material. They also have the option of following the instructions after listening to them from an adult.
By patiently listening to the instructions and following them step-by-step, it helps them carry out the tasks as required by them – (either alone or) while being part of a group. This helps them develop socially, enabling them build and forge relationships. It also helps them develop their creativity and imagination.
Example of Constructive Play
Malhar is a boy aged three. He plays with blocks by using his own creative thoughts and ideas, and uses them to create random things like cars, buildings, houses and tiny people, among others.
Three years later, when he is six, he plays with a more complex set of blocks that’s exclusively meant to build cars, trucks, etc. By reading the set of instructions that come along with the block set, and with a little bit of guidance from his parents by interacting with them, he successfully builds cars and trucks.
In this case scenario, when he was three, Malhar played only with his own creative ideas. When he was 6 however, not only did he play with his own creativity, he also developed language and social skills through his interaction with his parents.
Physical Play
Also called: Motor Play
Physical play refers to that kind of play which engages the fine motor muscles and the gross motor muscles of the child. The very fact that physical play engages both fine and gross motor muscles of the child, by itself, makes it one of the most important among the 16 different types of play in early childhood.
While activities such as sorting, buttoning, rolling, clay modelling, etc. help to develop the fine motor muscles; activities such as jumping, running, swimming, climbing, etc. help develop the gross-motor skills.
Children find play as an effective outlet to vent their bundled-up energy. Through physical or motor play, children get to develop strong bones, along with better hand-eye coordination skills. This kind of play helps them develop a sense of their self – physically, know their own physical boundaries, and control their impulses, among others.
As children learn to control their bodies and develop mastery over it, they start forming new connections in their brain. Connections, that are very essential for them to develop control over their movements at motor level, and their sense of understanding at the cognitive level. The sense of control develops their self-confidence, and helps them be able to socialise and have interactions with others.
All they require is a little bit of praise and encouragement to practice and develop their fine motor skills in a meaningful and fun-filled way. Once provided, the possibilities that can open up for them in terms of growth and development is almost limitless.
Example of Physical Play
A child with good fine-motor development will be good at holding and gripping things, which can reflect in their ability to write smoothly or sketch elegantly.
A child with well-developed gross motor skills will be good at running and jumping, climbing, and in some cases even at tumbling and somersaulting. They usually also have very good growth in terms of their height and bone density.
Rough & Tumble Play
Games such as peek-a-boo, free play at recess time like running, chasing, fleeing, wrestling, jumping up and down with both feet etc. are all examples of rough-and-tumble play. This play provides a safe and non-exploitative situation for the children to experiment and take up different social roles.
Children who are engaged in rough and tumble play construct their own sophisticated social environment, learn to cooperate and collaborate with their team well, and develop a good competitive spirit.
Example of Rough and Tumble Play
A child who is regularly involved in rough-and-tumble play demonstrates good social skills and well-developed relations with friends and among small groups.
Fantasy Play
Also called: Dramatic Play, Pretense Play, Symbolic Play or Imaginative Play
Fantasy play is a type of non-realistic play or a pretend play, wherein children play using their sense of imagination, and regard their physical environment either as a mark of their identity or as a symbol. They also use a wide range of imagination and recreate surroundings which they have observed.
The number objects used for fantasy play increases progressively as the child grows, especially between the 9th and the 30th month (2.5 years). Transformation of objects is mainly done through substitution, where they replace one object for another and act with them as if they were the actual objects which they intended to use.
Example of Fantasy Play
For instance, children may use a regular 24-inch ruler/scale as a sword during a fight in a battle scene they have imagined themselves in. Another common instance is when we see them playing by pushing a stool or chair, as if they were vehicles, and they regard the legs of the chair or stool as the wheels.
Dramatic play usually has the role of an adult in it, where children are given a situation or pretend to be someone different and play that character. Very often when children get together, they play games where they choose their character and pretend to be that character in front of others. Common examples include play games such as police and robber, doctor and patient, mother and child, etc.
Benefits of Fantasy Play
Exploration of different roles, and their relationships to other roles is also made possible through Fantasy play. Children are blessed in more ways than one in this kind of play, as they get the opportunity to practice their understanding of the roles and relationships in the real world (adult world).
Additionally, they also learn to develop out-of-the-box kind of thinking, whereby they develop the ability to ask questions about the ‘Why’ and ‘What’ with regard to rules and norms etc. Most of all, they also start exploring and challenging the logical processes and ways of the world.
When children engage themselves in fantasy play, they not only get an opportunity to escape from monotony and have fun, they also get multiple opportunities to develop their capacity to build skills.
In some cases, adults also give children instructions with scripted dialogue to perform, which are mostly part of their curriculum or for educational purposes. They invariably take time for them to enact.
Contrastingly, enactments come out well when they perform out of their own willingness rather than when they are asked to and/or is done under supervision. Having said, performing under supervision does help in bringing out their imagination more fully, and also enhances their level of understanding.
One of the best things about fantasy play is that it helps children build their vocabulary, as in order to enact their role, they need to read, understand and narrate their dialogues well.
Just like how adults could get engrossed in a book or watch a film as a means of escape from daily routine and the stress it causes, children often engage themselves in this kind of play to just be by themselves.
Adventure Play
Also called: Exploratory Play or Risk-Taking Play
Adventure play is mostly nature based, and is an activity where both children and adults enjoy equally. It involves indulging in something which is very new or unfamiliar. After all, nature, as we know it; is enormous and magnificent. And every time we explore it, we experience a sense of adventure.
Engaging in exploratory play helps the children to acquire many life skills, all while they go about satisfying their need for exploration. And that’s not all. They also develop the desire for and curiosity to learn and understand about new things.
Adventure play with children involves taking them for a walk in natural surroundings, or spending time being physical active in open spaces outside of their school premises. When children go through tasks such as climbing a tree, rope climbing, or climbing any physical structure in general; they experience risk-taking play.
Exploratory play is more prominent among younger children, since they are always excited when they see things for the first time. This is because they invariably get to know about a topic for the first time by hearing about it from someone. It is only later they get to know more details when they get to see or experience about that topic first hand, and therefore the excitement.
It is important that adults are very supportive in this kind of play, as children need to be given the opportunity to satisfy their curiosity and their sense of inquiry through their own experience using their own body and senses.
An adventurous or risk-taking behaviour plays a huge role in developing socialisation skills in children. It also allows them to get more interactive with nature and develop a bond with their peer group. Most of all, these kind of activities builds their self-confidence, which later helps them to achieve greater and more important skills and attributes which builds their personality during their adulthood.
Example of Adventure Play
If a batch of school children are taken to an adventure park, you’ll find most children just casually walk around and enjoy nature, while a few others will take on risky tasks like climbing a tree, a wall, or a small hill; or going kind of wild while playing with the swing by swinging hard as they swing standing.
Creative Play
Creative play is the kind of play that involves making use of materials that are commonly available within the living space. It is the most common kind of play where the child expresses his or her ideas with whatever material is available at his or her disposal.
Some of the skills children develop through simple creative play activities are:
- Intellectual
- Language
- Imagination
- Social
- Emotional
Since the above skills together fall across the physical, cognitive and psycho-social domains of development, creative play is considered crucial among the 16 different types of play in early childhood.
Example of Creative Play
For example, axles of wheels can be created using the refill of a ballpoint pen or a straw. Similarly, different fabrics can be bundled up and sewed together to form a toy. This way, children are able to experiment their imagination and see the finished version of their imagination – first hand, and also improvise on the same.
Sensory Motor Play
Sensory motor play is prominently observed during the infancy period, where child uses all sense organs to learn about his or her surroundings. What’s interesting about infancy is that anything that looks like – a thing, can stimulate the child’s sense organs, and each and every thing kind of becomes an object that is meant to be played with.
Exploration of objects and selection of novel objects for play is usually seen around nine months of age. They develop great affinity for objects that make noise, roll and bounce. Toys that follow the principle of cause and effect are enjoyed more by infants at twelve months of age.
Example of Sensory Motor Play
A child playing with a soft squeeze toy that makes a sound every time it is squeezed, will eventually understands the principle of cause and effect.
Practice Play
Practice play is one where children learn new skills by repetitive behavior. Through repetition, they also develop mastery of the skills by perfecting their hand-eye coordination, which is very essential for them to excel in games and sports.
What’s special about experiencing this kind of play, is that it does not disappear from the child’s memory as he/she grows up, and remains throughout his or her life.
Practice play is more common in preschool years, a phase during which children engage in play that involves jumping, sliding, twirling, or throwing balls or other objects.
Example of Practice Play
Example of practice play include activities such as a running race, sliding, jungle-gym, throwing and catching balls, and games that are similar in nature. Practice play help children develop their social skills and gives them an opportunity for multiple interactions.
Language Play
Making repetitive cooing sound during infancy is the initiation of the development of language play in children. This is followed by the use of voice, sounds and words for communication and entertainment.
Invention of new words, practicing rhymes, becoming kind of miniature comedians, and responding to everything that’s spoken to them are all part of the growing up process.
Children also use grammar for play. It is a medium through which a child expresses his or her thoughts and ideas, and they keep learning new things every day in language play. Songs, games stories and books are the other sources of language development.
Parents have a prominent place in the initiation of language play in children, as they are ones who introduce language to the child – first. Children invoke themselves in language play just to engage, communicate and to also give directions.
Example of Language Play
A parent reading a bedtime story to the child in an animated way, during which the child learns new vocabulary, the way it should be pronounced and also tries to repeat some of the words.
Games with Electronic Gadgets
Most people across the world, right from infancy to adults, are captivated by games with electronic gadgets. Gadget based games easily attracts people from all walks of life, since they’re far more entertaining than most entertainment out there, and you almost never become tired playing them.
What makes it more interesting, is that there are a lot of gadget games which help children gain knowledge, which also makes it really attractive to spend time with them.
Children are often given gadgets with the sole purpose of hoping that they do not disturb the adults as long as they’re holding and playing with them. However, as the frequency of playing gadget games increases, the child’s physical development gets adversely affected over time due to lack of adequate movement.
If that wasn’t enough, most of the gadget based games are highly addictive in nature and has its own set of ill effects on children – if it is used for a long period of time. There are exceptions, of course.
Example of Games with Electronic Gadgets
Mobile apps that teach children new words, music, science, how to write, math, and even to code.
Traditional Play
Each geographical area within a nation invariably has its own set of traditional play and games associated with their unique culture.
In many countries, including India, most toys for kids are made with locally available materials. Adults also teach kids that traditional games have a cultural significance, which helps them develop their knowledge about their culture, tradition and heritage.
Example of Traditional Play
In India, games such as Gilli Danda, Langdi, Pallanguzhi, Pambaram, Chathuranga, etc. are commonly played by children, as it is a great way to engage themselves socially in their neighborhood and among their peer group.
Competitive Play
One of the ways children get to know their own ability when compared to others – when they engage in competitive play. What makes competitive play special, is that it helps a child to understand that not all games are being played to be won. In other words, children get to learn that one can play – just to play!
They get to understand that some games are played to develop their social interaction skills, resilience, and the ability to control their emotions. What makes competitive play even more special, is that it provides the child an opportunity to display his or her intellectual capacity and emotional stability on the field – in different situations, along with physical ability.
Example of Competitive Play
By involving in competitive games, a child develops the ability to understand that not all games can be won, not all are meant to be won; and that failure is – a part and parcel of life. The child also gets to understand that when it comes to success, one should just celebrate the moment – and move on, and when it comes to failure, one should learn from it – and move forward.
Simply put, whether it is success or failure, the child learns that one shouldn’t dwell on it for too long and just keep going ahead.
This kind of outlook helps the child to look at failure, just like success, as just another event in life. Studies have also found that children with this kind of outlook tend to have a healthy mind later in their lives as adults.
Social Play
Social play basically involves interaction with peers. This play activity typically increases dramatically during the preschool years. What makes this kind of play important, is that it has a significant contribution towards a child’s overall development.
Through social play, children learn many aspects about social and communication skills, which include behaviors such as cooperating, sharing, compromising, understanding, problem-solving, empathizing, and more.
When children are engaged in social play, which is by far one of the most important among the 16 different types of play in early childhood, they get an opportunity to enact various roles. This in turn, helps them learn – through experience, about how to behave during different situations.
What makes social play powerful, is that it helps them learn important life skills like negotiating, bargaining and tactfulness too. This kind of play provides children with ample opportunities to learn, practice, develop and hone on these skills, therefore helping them unleash their potential.
Example of Social Play
When children engage in social games, they learn to observe and understand the behavior of not only the members of their peer group, but also the behavior of adults. They also learn how to be self-aware and only respond to situations and not reacting to them. Over time, they get adept at demonstrating behavior that is appropriate for a given situation.
Games
Games are activities that have rules, and are engaged in purely for the pleasure of it. They often involve competition too. During their pre-school years, children may begin to participate in social games, which involves the application of simple rules like taking turns. However, games take on a much stronger role in their lives once they get into elementary school.
Example of Games
Examples of games may include all indoor and outdoor activities that have rules to follow. These can be activities as common as a running race or a frog race, to all kinds of games like hide-and-seek, carrom board, football, musical chairs, badminton etc.
Conclusion
Nurturing children well through their early childhood years is all about helping them grow into individuals who have control on their body and mind. It is about helping them blossom into individuals who are capable of cooperating and coordinating not only with their individual fellow playmate, but all the playmates within their peer group or team.
Most of all, it is about helping them to be able to think at social problems only as social situations, and that they are challenges meant to be solved by themselves. All this, and more, can be achieved –through play.
It is therefore essential that children are given ample opportunities to experiment by playing these 16 different types of play in early childhood years, so that they are able to develop holistically – and unleash their full potential.