Play for Children with Special Needs

Supporting children with learning differences, 3-9

Christine Macintyre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135188597
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

There are many more children with learning differences and difficulties in our schools today. Their needs are varied and complex and professionals must find appropriate ways to enhance their learning. The value of play is endorsed in policy initiatives including The Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum, so professionals can be reassured that 'more time to play' is in line with the latest thinking.

Christine Macintyre emphasises the importance of creating an environment where children become confident, independent learners, increasingly able to use their imaginations, care for others and to take safe risks. This fully revised edition of Play for Children with Special Needs includes new research findings and explains their implications for practice.

This book then enables those supporting children to:

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• understand the benefits of play and how to adapt different scenarios to support children who do not find it easy to play

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• observe children as they play so that any difficulties can be identified early

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• analyse different play areas so that the different kinds of learning (intellectual, creative, motor, social and emotional) are appreciated.

Play for Children with Special Needs, 2nd edition enables practitioners to appreciate the contribution that play makes to the education of all children, whether they have special needs or not. It is for parents, teachers, teaching assistants and nursery professionals as well as those who care for children at home.

Chapter 1
The ambience of the setting

A plea for time and calm

Please give me time to look and learn – to understand my day,
Please give me time to try things out before you show the way,
Please hold my hand and comfort me whenever things go wrong,
Please let me close my eyes awhile – the day can seem so long
Please understand that I am me and however much I try,
I cannot do what others do,
Please someone, tell me why?

Christine Macintyre

After working for many years with teachers, nursery nurses and teaching assistants who support children with learning differences, difficulties and disabilities, I penned this verse, hoping it might encapsulate children’s feelings as they confront each day in nursery, at play group, with a childminder or at school. I need to explain two things. The first is why I find the pleas so important in structuring the best learning environment for young children, and the second is to show how, in the early years and beyond, this should be grounded in the optimum learning medium, play.

So why should these lines be relevant to the ways in which children learn and the ways in which we interact with children? Let’s consider them in turn.

Please give me time to look and learn, to understand my day…

This first line reminds us that, while some children need a great deal of physical and psychological support, and others need less, all of them can manage a little more if they are just given time and space to plan their thoughts and their actions. This happens best when they are not harried and hassled by having to keep up with other children or when parents or teachers tell them – or imply, possibly by sighing, maybe by being brisk – that they are too slow or that they are wasting ‘valuable’ time! Many children just need a bit longer ‘to understand their day’, but when they do, they will realise that they have done well and their self-esteem will be enhanced. They will have learned and achieved! If children are not worried by ‘doing things in time’, they will be freed to concentrate on the task in hand. Hopefully that will be playing!

It is not surprising that many, perhaps even most, children need more time because the social nature of education means they are part of an ever-changing environment with different people, places and things. For those whose eyes need just a little longer to focus or who initially make inaccurate spatial judgements that need further planning or who see others threateningly close and need a moment to adjust their perceptions, having more time is an essential prerequisite to learning. And then there are the hypersensitive children who anticipate that noises and bright lights will prevent them from enjoying their day. Drums and maracas set out in the music area suggest there will be (to them) intolerable noise. There will also be children who are flustered and dismayed by any kind of change. The discovery that there is a new practitioner instead of their very favourite lady brings the fear that she might not know that they need help at the toilet or that they don’t understand English too well. Is it any wonder that children can be overwhelmed by it all? The stress can become much worse if they have to add time pressure to their concerns.

Or perhaps more time is needed so that children can enjoy and act out their fantasies? Is this not a key part of being a child?

Listen to Gerda and Dino, Leah’s 4-year-olds, who had been listening to the story of Icarus flying too near the sun. They came in from the garden with some autumn leaves clutched in their hands.

Gerda: Look at these poor leaves. They are all sad and crispy because the wind blew them up too near the sun and they got burnt.

Dino: And they went up into the clouds where the cloudberries live. The cloudberries pop when it rains and the leaves come down again but they aren’t the same any more.

Gerda: The clouds are puffy and soft and swirly and the grey bits are the stems of the berries.

Dino: No, that’s the seeds inside the berries – they are ready to pop out and be snowyberries. They are hard and hit you on the head and it’s sore. Lots of snowyberries make a snowman.

Can anyone justify not giving the children time to use their imaginations and enjoy their fantasy life? Some of the other children picked up the rhythm of ‘snowyberry’ and soon a group were chanting variations midst lots of laughter when rainyberry, muddyberry, hailyberry and windyberry, even stinkyberry, were suggested. The children then acted out how the different berries would dance in the wind as they flew from the sun. Later another child mused, ‘Sometimes in the winter the sky is all red and that’s the leaves that stayed up there shining down. They didn’t want to come down with the rain because they wanted to paint the sky.’

Whoever could have pre-planned a lesson on painting the sky? The children had so much fun and this led naturally to them asking about the colours in rainbows and considering different hues and tints. One group after hearing the story about the pot of gold that can be found at the end of the rainbow even made a stash of gold coins while the others painted a huge rainbow. Another child asked Leah if she had heard the story of the boy who searched for the house with gold windows. All of this developed from listening to the children and giving them time to fantasise a world much more colourful and lively than some of them had at home. And when little Lauren added, ‘When I go to Heaven I’ll see all the leaves and help to make them pretty because I’m good at painting’, even the experienced teachers could only nod and blink away their tears.

So if the children’s ideas are heard and treated with respect and developed and danced, their world can be richer than the adults’ world. They are not limited by things having to be correct or better than someone else’s. How lovely it can be when they are given time to follow their ideas through.

One child then asked if strawberries were made out of straw, and a more formal teacher-led lesson looking into the differences between growing and planting raspberries, blueberries, strawberries and cloudberries (these are grown in South Africa) naturally developed and led to other questions. ‘Why are there no pinkberries or stinkyberries?’ asked Grace. ‘There must be pink berries,’ replied Jake, ‘because my Daddy drinks pink juice. He says it’s medicine, but I know it’s wine!’ Then the name ‘stinkyberries’ raised the question of whether different berries had different smells, and a fun game of identifying raspberries, cherries and blackcurrants by their scents, then their tastes, was enjoyed.

But there was no doubt which part of the experience the children enjoyed most as requests ‘to play the birling leaves again’ met with claps and cheers! Their teacher, Leah, was enchanted to have supported the children in their fantasy play. She recorded that they had ‘imagined new worlds’ but in so doing felt the learning was diminished because her terse recording didn’t really do justice to the children’s imaginative story-making. ‘It is so hard to record what makes learning experiences really special,’ she explained, ‘but how do you record the intensity, the laughter and the rhythm, the new ideas and the social learning in listening to others?’ How do you show the smiles on all the faces, including my own? Furthermore, and very importantly, no one was left out. All the children could suggest a name or use the one someone else had suggested. And even the one or two children who couldn’t say the words could join in, for they could make their hands and fingers dance.

Reflecting on the experience

Later Leah explained that she was so glad that she had experienced the children’s fantasy play because she felt she had ‘more than survived’ letting the children take the lead in developing new ideas. She explained:

I don’t worry so much now because I know I can go with the flow, but it takes experience and confidence to do this. When the children are being imaginative, somehow they don’t play up and be silly, they are engrossed in suggesting ideas.

She was also delighted that children with quite severe movement and planning difficulties joined in, even choosing to be whirlyberries when the reality was that their movement was quite restricted by cerebral palsy. She also was glad that one of the children on the autistic spectrum had joined in with the whirling actions. ‘For once,’ she exclaimed, ‘Gordon didn’t have to try to restrict his flapping and birling [spinning round]. It was all part of the fun.’

The total involvement meant that the learning was meaningful; there was something different, a whole new experience to be described at home and replayed at school. That would help the children retain the new learning in their memories.

But of course there are many other types of play that are important and they must be given time too if the curriculum is to be balanced and develop the myriad of skills and competences the children require.

Rote learning and meaningful learning

We also have to remember that there are many children who appear to be coping with the myriad of learning experiences they encounter in the day, but in truth are finding the pace difficult. They are likely to be resorting to rote learning rather than really understanding the meaning of what is being taught. Would they not also benefit from some extra time so that they could internalise more of the learning context and content at their own pace? If there was more time, they could explain any difficulties and have the teacher recap appropriately and so reinforce the content. Perhaps then they could remember more and store that learning in their memories so that they would have a comparative base when other, new learning came along? This process, called habituation, is particularly difficult for children with dyspraxia and dyslexia and other conditions where ‘poor memorising’ means that they have to tackle each task as a first-time try instead of starting from an informed base. Without recall, even carrying out basic skills can seem like learning to drive every time they are attempted!

The danger is that surface or rote learning can take over from meaningful learning, which, based in the child’s own experience, is more readily remembered. Rote learning can promote instant recall and so is useful up to a point. For example, in the nursery it is useful to rote-learn routines, e.g. ‘I get my pinny and then wash my hands before snack.’ This aids memorising and remembering the sequence of events. Better still if there can be photos or other visual aids especially for children with Down’s syndrome and others – for most children are visual learners, are they not?

So rote learning supports all kinds of instant recall, e.g. providing answers in quiz successes, remembering street names and train times and of course in helping children chant their times tables. It is also invaluable for helping children to acquire the skills of daily living, e.g. safely carrying and using scissors, pouring hot liquid, hammering nails and chiselling wood.

When children don’t understand safety issues or refuse to comply or do not understand the implications of actions, then using ‘rules’ and demonstrations to show the most efficient way makes sense. It is too dangerous to let them discover ways for themselves. Many children on the autistic spectrum (see Appendix 3) benefit from ABA therapy (applied behaviour analysis), where everyday tasks are broken down into components that match the child’s competence and these parts are practised separately, and then combined till the skill is achieved. Then they gain a reward. This promotes competent behaviour without the need for the children to rationalise or problem-solve but it does build up a skill base so that children can safely do more things for themselves. But skills in isolation, i.e. taken out of context, can lack meaning. Many children on the autistic spectrum find it particularly difficult if not impossible to attach meaning, a process that is intuitive in most children. Charlotte Moore (2004) tells of her son Sam, who had autism. He had a favourite soft toy, as many neurotypical children do, ‘but the toy was a comforter, not a friend, he never gave it a name or a personality’. So his playing experience was severely restricted by his condition. This, i.e. how children use their toys, could provide a key focus for observation for practitioners in an early years setting.

Attaching meaning to experience

But real learning comes when attached meaning turns an isolated experience into a personalised ‘whole’. Think of a child receiving a birthday gift. Even young children soon recognise that the giver has chosen something with care and that feelings will be hurt if it is not received graciously. For them, remembering the exchange will symbolise a whole social experience and will be used as a basis for understanding the giving and receiving that is part of everyday living. But children who have a disjointed sense of reality may be dismayed that the parcel was wrapped up at all and may even be dismayed by the torn-off paper, for some attribute feelings to inanimate objects.

Transfer of learning

Memorising helps the transfer of learning from one experience to another. If the teacher could point out similarities between what the children do and how this is similar to other people’s experience, transfer would be helped. So after the children have fetched the...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The ambience of the setting
• Chapter 2 The essence of play
• Chapter 3 Early indicators of learning differences
• Chapter 4 Analysing and adapting play opportunities, particularly for children with learning differences (SEN)
• Chapter 5 Understanding the learning process as children play
• Appendix 1 Down’s syndrome
• Appendix 2 Attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
• Appendix 3 An introduction to autism, Asperger’s syndrome and teaching strategies to support the children
• Appendix 4 An introduction to cerebral palsy
• Appendix 5 Understanding dyspraxia
• Appendix 6 Dyslexia
• Appendix 7 Tap Time and Sensations
• Bibliography
• Index