Early Years Play and Learning

Developing Social Skills and Cooperation

Pat Broadhead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134412266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This practical book provides an accessible framework for observing and assessing children's learning through play. It will help early years practitioners to deepen their understanding of the links between intellectual development, the growth of language and the emotional well-being of young children.

Drawing on many years of research and working with teachers, Pat Broadhead has developed the Social Play Continuum, a unique observation tool and a means of monitoring and developing a child's social progress through skills such as problem-solving, investigation and imagination discourse. This tool forms an integral part of this innovative text, offering practitioners in a wide range of early years settings a means of focusing their observations of play. In addition, the book:

• supports the development of 'areas of provision'
• illustrates progression from 'association' to 'cooperative' play
• considers links with the Foundation Stage Curriculum, Profiling and the National Curriculum
• acknowledges the many constraints that have operated on early years practitioners in the past decade.

Blending theory and practice this book is aimed at all early years' practitioners concerned with quality provision for their pupils. It is also the ideal text to support student teachers, classroom assistants and undergraduates on early childhood studies degrees.

Chapter 1

Areas of Provision in early years settings

Building on our heritage in the early years

Areas of Provision are well established within curricular experiences for young children in this country, although more substantially perhaps, in nurseries and playgroups where play-based approaches to teaching and learning have more traditionally allowed children to use all their senses when learning. Sand, water, large and small construction, small world and role play have, for a long time, been taken for granted as essential for supporting young children's learning. In each of these areas of play and exploration, the young child, alone, with adults and with peers, can direct their play and expand their understandings of how the world works and of how they can have influence within and upon that world.

It seems important to think beyond the actual ‘materials’ themselves (sand, water, bricks, etc.) and to consider how these long-established play opportunities relate one with another and with other resources — hence the use and exploration of the term ‘Areas of Provision’ in the book. It may be that these play opportunities are so taken for granted that there's been a tendency to ‘provide them’ but not to focus to any great extent on their ongoing development and enhancement. In addition, as is discussed a little later in the chapter, their very existence as play opportunities may have been threatened by many of the enforced changes that have arisen from substantial legislation over the past 15 years and its subsequent long-term impact on schools, nurseries and playgroups (David etal.,1993; David, 1999).

Sand and water play have long been associated with the development of mathematical and scientific knowledge in the early years curriculum. Associated mathematical and scientific vocabulary can be introduced, practised and understood alongside the tipping and pouring and the scooping and sifting.

Sand and water are natural media and are recognized as having strong therapeutic properties (for adults as well as for children). Brierley (1993) points out that while modern children have many visual experiences in their early years of growth and development, tactile experiences are often more limited. At this age, texture is ‘important and fascinating’. He reminds us that ‘children's exploring fingers are an extension of their eyes’ (p. 60) and through tactile experiences young children learn to discriminate. Also, sand and water can become settings for imaginative and fantasy-based activity. Given a range of types of play resources from which to choose, a water tray can become a shop and a sand tray can be used to retell familiar stories from books, television and cinema – and vice versa. They enable children to revisit and relive their social and cultural experiences and events. Through these resources we can bring the outside indoors in a country renowned for inclement weather.

Having researched in and visited many Norwegian classrooms, it was interesting to note that these Areas of Provision (sand and water) seldom made an appearance indoors; this illustrates the importance of recognizing the impact of tradition on our provision. In Norway, it seems that they are absent from classrooms because (despite what we might consider their inclement weather) Norwegian children spend considerable amounts of time outdoors and it is here that they dig and wade, investigate and explore. Educators there may feel that children do not need the outdoors brought indoors in a small-scale way. Teachers I have worked with who did bring the outdoors in in this way did begin to see benefits for children. They began to observe that the ways in which children played with water indoors were different from outdoor play because of the smaller scale. Despite outdoor access, indoor play was popular with the children who would continue outdoor themes but also play more interactively with peers, perhaps encouraged by the closer physical proximity around the tray. The teachers observed, in particular, that the children's play allowed them to connect emotional expression with physical and imaginative engagement. The following scenario illustrates some of this in a small way. It was a scenario that I observed over several days while working with two Norwegian teachers making a video on aspects of classroom organization and planning.

In Siv's classroom, in northern Norway, a six-year-old boy, new to the class and the local area, was having great trouble settling into the daily routines. He withdrew himself from class activity regularly and disrupted from a distance. He wandered around the room, disrupting others as they worked and played. On the day we introduced the water tray, he headed for it straight away. He played in a solitary way for much of the time but as Siv watched and listened, she saw his clear preoccupation with the boats and heard his occasional discussion with others about his father who was away fishing in the Lufoten Islands. After his water play, he approached Siv, who was with a group of children in the writing area. He said he wanted to draw a picture of his father on his boat. Because Siv now knew of these circumstances, based on her observations, she was able to chat to him about his father. The boy agreed that he missed his father and talked about when he thought he would return. He drew his picture and wrote a few words. He then walked around the room, smiling and talking to other children and showing them his picture. Soon, many of the children in the class, as well as Siv, knew about his father. This activity had drawn him into the class community in a small but seemingly important way. Siv remarked, later in the week, that his disruptive behaviour had diminished from that point. He began to respond more positively when she drew him into whole class discussions and he also talked more freely and regularly about his father. He began to make a book for his father for when he came home from fishing.

This scenario illustrates the therapeutic qualities of such play along with its potential to link into other areas of learning and knowledge.

In relation to the origins of construction play, at the turn of the century, in European kindergartens, Froebel's ‘gifts’ were demonstrating the potential of wooden bricks in nurturing children's mathematical knowledge and problem-solving skills. Building on Froebel's work and ideas, Gura (1992:31) gives us a detailed illustration of the power of block play in contributing mathematically and scientifically to children's learning as they simultaneously master three-dimensional space and develop their understanding of physical balance, structural integrity and visual harmony. As well as illustrating the aesthetic properties of block play, Gura details its capacity for allowing children to represent ideas non-verbally and symbolically. Children are ‘natural improvisers’ (p. 123). In relation to block play, Gura identifies a phenomenon that teachers and I noted in our observations of children in all Areas of Provision. She likens it to the way communications are exchanged between dancers, choreographers and their audience:

Meanings are passed on, picked up and negotiated between individuals or between members of a group and even between groups, who share understandings of the system and the kinds of things that can be said with it.

(p. 42)

The teachers and I also spoke of ‘a kind of telepathy’ that very focused, cooperating children seemed to have. They seemed to need few words to share their common vision. There were occasions when we observed their play for some time without knowing what it was that the children were building because they seemed to have passed the need to discuss it with one another. Such examples are illustrated in Chapter 3.

Small world resources and role play meet imaginative and emotional needs (as of course do sand, water and construction). They allow the child to represent and relive the familiar and the unfamiliar. A child can re-engage, in a personally controlled way, with experiences and events that have made them fearful, anxious, angry, happy, curious and pleased. Susan Isaacs’ beliefs-in-action in the Maltings School continue to open our minds to the young child's emotional life. Her philosophy about free expression underpinned children's experiences and, as Drummond (2000) points out in her re-examination of Isaacs’ beliefs and practice, there was virtually no constraint on children's verbal expression nor on their intellectual impulses. Their expressions of infantile sexuality, their anal and urethral interests and their feelings (including anger and aggression) along with their views on everything around them were all allowed expression.

As Drummond goes on to discuss, Isaacs recognized the importance of connecting the affective with the cognitive – the emotional with the intellectual – an interconnectedness with much currency in present-day thinking about the nature of learning across all age groups, adults as well as children.

It is likely that Is accs would see modern-day provision for emotional expression as a dilution of her own philosophies. Undoubtedly and perhaps inevitably we have become more pragmatic and constrained in what we do and offer in present-day settings. As Drummond (2000) notes, in modern-day early years settings, we are more constrained by conventions to select for our attention those aspects of children and of childhood that fit our hopes and dreams for children and for society. Susan Isaacs was clearly an exceptional individual in many ways, willing to take risks and push back boundaries in the interests of young children's development.

Many of today's early years educators also aim to offer as many opportunities as possible for children's emotional expression alongside opportunities for authentic and comprehensive investigation and question-raising by children. Some educators may be prepared and able to push back the boundaries further than others. As this research has shown, and as later chapters will illustrate, supportive head teachers were essential for the teachers involved in this research to become willing to reintroduce Areas of Provision into their reception and Year 1 classrooms in the face of what they saw as a prevailing preoccupation with ‘formal learning’ and ‘attaining set standards’. As Dowling (1995) notes, the early years ‘sensitive’ head may find it easier to be supportive than do head teachers whose experience is mainly with older children.

In briefly introducing these Areas of Provision, it is not the intention to establish their isolation, one from another, in educators’ minds. Rather, it is:

• to recognize and build on our early years, educational traditions and heritage with a timely refocusing on the development of Areas of Provision in early years settings
• to begin to make explicit the distinctive yet interrelated contributions from within and across the Areas of Provision in supporting children's social, emotional and intellectual growth
• to recognize these Areas for their potential to assist educators in their finely tuned and well-focused observations of children at play
• drawing on their observations of children at play, to then assist educators in developing their Areas of Provision in creative and informed ways.

Let us move on to consider briefly some aspects that might have inhibited the creative development of Areas of Provision in early years settings in more recent years.

The early years in a changing world

Since the 1944 Education Act, and until very recently, the provision of nursery education had been at the discretion of a local authority. This led to wide regional variations in levels of nursery provision in this country (DES, 1990; National Commission on Education, 1993). It was not until the Children Act of 1989 that local authorities were required to make provision, in this case, for children in need and including those not yet in school. Almost ten years later, the 1998 Education Act required local authorities to make sufficient places available so as to ensure that five half-days of free provision would be available for all four-year-olds – this was the first time that statutory provision had been made for four-year-olds in England and Wales. This legislation was followed by similar provision for three-year-olds, beginning in 2000 in areas of economic disadvantage. These initiatives are funded by the government, through local authorities.

From the mid-1980s onwards, the educational world has experienced massive changes across all age ranges. This has required primary schools to engage in multiple innovation management (Wallace, 1991) through their increasingly focused engagement with school development planning (Broadhead et al.,1996; 1998). Numerous Education Acts in a comparatively brief period (compared to other, similar periods in history) have ensured that momentum was maintained in the pace of change in primary schools. Anyone who has worked in schools throughout this period would not doubt that managing and surviving change have been the order of the day for some time.

During this period, change was impacting on providers for young children in other ways. Playgroups, established as a temporary measure in the 1960s, became widely established as the anticipated expansion of provision for young children recommended by the Plowden Report (CACE, 1967) and the Framework for Expansion (under Margaret Thatcher as Secretary of State for Education in 1978) failed to materialize. From 1998 onwards, playgroups have become established as mainstream providers and local authorities are charged with ensuring (via the Early Years Development and Childcare Partnership, EYDCP) that local playgroups are sustainable and are staffed by suitably qualified personnel – bringing considerable new responsibilities and demands to voluntary sector workers.

The 1990s also saw a rapid expansion of private nurseries as they too recognized the need to fill the gaps in areas where statutory services were insufficient for young children and families. Women were returning to work in greater numbers, or returning after maternity leaves, families were seeking dual incomes where possible and as we moved into the millennium, opportunities for and levels of interest in Lifelong Learning were increasing. Local authorities, via the EYDCP, acquired similar responsibilities in relation to private providers to those they had for the voluntary sector in ensuring that three- and four-year-olds receive their entitlement for their five half-days (or 12| hours) of free provision in a ‘quality’ environment.

The High/Scope work in the USA had long been reporting its findings to show that early interventions, via good quality pre-school experiences that actively involve parents, have a positive impact (see Schweinhart et al.,1993; O'Flaherty, 1995). One of the most enticing aspects of these findings for government, as they began to permeate consciousness on this side of the Atlantic, was that early intervention could save money later on, in costly interventions relating for example to family break-up, teenage pregnancies and levels of criminality. This research was to impact on Labour policy from 1998 onwards, after the publication of Meeting the Childcare Challenge(DfEE, 1998a) and a plethora of related initiatives aimed at intervention, including the establishing of Early Excellence Centres and Sure Start initiatives across the country, further initiatives to be overseen and coordinated by the EYDCPs.

The educational legislation that has impacted on how we make provision for younger children includes the 1986, the 1988 and the 1992 Education Acts. These respectively introduced Local Management of Schools, a National Curriculum and its assessment and the Monitoring and Inspection of Schools, with the first Monitoring and Inspection Framework for nursery and primary schools following a few years later (Of STED, 1995).

As head teachers and chairs of governors began to manage their budgets in the late 1980s and on into the early 1990s they came to see, very clearly, the value of a four-year-old in a context of funding formulas. Young children have a relatively high monetary value in many formulas for funding. In relative terms, across the primary age range, four-year-olds bring a substantial premium into the school. Their presence in school also secures future funding for the school at an early stage in the child's school career. The early 1990s saw some pressures on parents, by some head teachers, to admit children early to school ‘in order to secure their place’. Despite the fact that the 1944 Education Act requires that a child should be in full-time education ‘at the beginning of the term after the term in which they are five’, by 1995 estimates of around 75 per cent of four-year-olds and non-statutory five-year-old children were being quoted. Being prior to legislation relating to class sizes for reception and Key Stage 1 children (this legislation was to be in place by September 2000), these pre-school aged children could find themselves in classes of 35 or more children with only one adult to care for and educate them (Oberhuemer and Ulich, 1997).

From the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, studies had begun to illustrate some of the dangers for young children in this potentially premature engagement with formal learning and extensive teacher-directed activity (Bennett and Kell, 1989; DES, 1989; Cleave and Brown, 1991). Sylva (1991) identified the phenomenon of ‘too formal too soon’ and went on to point out the dangers of the ‘overly academic curriculum’ limiting opportunities for young children to be self-determining and self-directing in their learning.

Another outcome of the 1986 and 1988 Acts and the devolution of funding to schools was, as predicted, to place them within a competitive, market-forces-led climate. The publ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Early Years Play and Learning
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1    Areas of Provision in early years settings
• 2    The Social Play Continuum
• 3    Using the Social Play Continuum
• 4    Scaffolding the growth of sociability and cooperation: Children as co-constructors of the early years curriculum
• 5    Literacy and numeracy: Harnessing emerging interests and skills and continuing to co-construct the curriculum
• 6    Emotional well-being, making choices, time to learn
• References
• Index