Inspirational Play

Grace-a-ChildUSA is committed to providing enriching experiences through active, intentional play. Research supports our position on play and is an integral part of our ministry services.

Community Play Packages

Hours of Operation:
7:00 am to 6:00 pm, Monday - Friday

Price per person -- $6.00

10 Visit Discount Pass -- $50.00

Monthly Pass (unlimited visits) -- $75.00 (Includes all classes and open play)

Fees include inside and outside play areas.

Rocket Room -- Indoor Inspirational Playroom

Galaxy Playground -- Outdoor Intentional Fun

 

CLINICAL REPORT

The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds

Kenneth R. Ginsburg, MD, MSEd and the Committee on Communications and the Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health

Play is essential to development because it contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and youth. Play also offers an ideal opportunity for parents to engage fully with their children. Despite the benefits derived from play for both children and parents, time for free play has been markedly reduced for some children. This report addresses a variety of factors that have reduced play, including a hurried lifestyle, changes in family structure, and increased attention to academics and enrichment activities at the expense of recess or free child-centered play. This report offers guidelines on how pediatricians can advocate for children by helping families, school systems, and communities consider how best to ensure that play is protected as they seek the balance in children’s lives to create the optimal developmental milieu.

ARTICLE

The Importance of Play

By R.E. Owens, Jr., Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall

It is easy to forget that much of a child's language develops within the context of play with an adult or with other children. Play can be an ideal vehicle for language acquisition for a number of reasons (Sachs, 1984):

• Since play is not goal oriented, it removes pressure and frustration from the interactive process. It's fun.
• Attention and the semantic domain are shared by the interactive partners, so topics are shared.
• Games have reciprocal role structure and variations in the order of elements, as do grammars.
• Games, like conversations, contain turn-taking.

In languages as different as English and Japanese, levels of play and language development appear to be similar (McCune-Nicolich, 1986; Ogura, 1991). Play and language develop interdependently and demonstrate underlying cognitive developments. This relationship is presented in the table below. Initially, both play and language are very concrete and depend on the here and now. With cognition maturity, however, they both become less concrete. At about the time that children begin to combine symbols, they begin to play symbolically in which one play object, such as a shoe, is used for another, such as a telephone. In like fashion, symbols represent concepts.

Children often attempt to involve their parents in this pretend play. As playmates, parents can show by example how to play. Often, parents contribute running narratives of the play as it progresses and provide children with the basic problem-resolution narrative or story model. Even 2-year-olds can learn the basic problem-resolution format, as in "The doggie barked, so Mommy let her go outside." In general, the number of sequences in children's play is related to the syntactic complexity of their speech (Bates, Bretherton, & Snyder, 1988).

Thematic role playing and accompanying linguistic style changes begin at around age 3. By this age, children possess generalized sequential scripts of many familiar situations (Nelson, 1986). At first, a child's role represents himself or herself. Later roles are projected on other persons and dolls. Eventually, an object may play a reciprocal role.

By age 4 a child is able to role-play a baby, using a higher pitch, phonetic substitutions, shorter and simpler utterances, and more references to self. At about this time, a child begins to role-play "Mom and Dad" differently. In general, mothers are portrayed as more polite, using more indirect requests, with a higher pitch and longer utterances. Role-played fathers make more commands and give less explanation for their behavior. Prosodic and rhythmic devices are the first stylistic variations used by children, followed by appropriate content and then syntactic regularities.

Although the language used in solitary play is not typical of a child's performance, social play is quite different. In social play, language is used explicitly to convey meaning because of the different realistic and imaginary meanings of props ("This'll be a phone") and roles ("You be the daddy"). Language is used to clarify ("You can't say that if you're the baby") and negotiate ("Okay, you can say it if you want to"). Play themes consist of sequential episodes whose organization increases with a child's age (Galda, 1984; Pellegrini, 1985). The language used in play is influenced by the participants and the play context. In general, preschoolers prefer same-gender pairs with no adult present (Pellegrini & Perlmutter, 1989). While children of both genders prefer replica play, such as dolls, a pretend store, or dress-up, boys also prefer play with blocks. Initially, preschoolers prefer very functionally explicit props, such as a phone, car, or cup. As children mature and participate in more frequent imaginative play, they use more ambiguous props, such as blocks or stones, that can represent other entities (Pellegrini & Perlmutter, 1989).

Although a preschool child is too young for team games and is not cognitively ready to follow game rules, he or she does enjoy group activities. Language learning is enhanced by the songs, rhymes, and finger plays common among children in daycare or preschool. Within play, a child and a communication partner can participate in a dialog free of the pressures of "real" communication. In addition, the child is free to experiment with different communication styles and roles...after all, this is play!

LINKS TO MORE ARTICLES

Article: Importance of Play in Early Childhood
Tip Sheet
Article: Importance of Play
Atlantic Magazine: The Importance of Play

 

BACK TO TOP