repeatedly hitting the ground with a shovel, or repetitively going up and down the steps,
exploratory play, pretend play, construction play, building sand castles, and games with
rules.
The second category is "social play." This category encapsulates the various ways
children interact with peers during free play opportunities. These include
solitary/independent play, parallel play children play beside each other but not with each
other, buddy play 2 children play together, and group play.
The third category deals with children's physical development. This includes physical
growth of the body and vital organs, health-related fitness, …show more content…
Engaging in free
play behaviors provides children with a means to explore, interact with, and learn about
their environments. Play contains all developmental tendencies and is itself a major
source of development Vygotsky, 1978.
Children's cognitive development is triggered when they play. Jean Piaget, one of the
most highly regarded early childhood theorists, believed that play performs a major role
in children's expanding mental abilities (1962). It is during free play that children
develop language skills, and enhance their means of decision making and start to explore
their creativity side. (Bodrova & Leong, 1996; Fromberg & Gullo, 1992; Isaacs, 1933;
Smilansky & Shefatya, 1990). According to Frost (1992), play is the primary means of
imagination, intelligence, language, and perceptual-motor abilities in infants and young
children.
The processes of problem solving, reasoning, concrete abilities and judgment are …show more content…
Vygotsky (1978) proposed that children have a zone of proximal development, or
a range of tasks between those that children can handle it, without help and those that
they can master with the assistance of adults or more competent peers. Vygotsky also
proposed that. Play also creates the zone of proximal development of the child. A Child
always behaves beyond his standard age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though
he were a head taller than himself. While children are playing, they are building complex
abilities of investigation, questioning, exploring, reasoning, testing, hypothesizing,
rationalizing, creating, and imagining. The freedom of play also affects a second part of
children's cognitive development, their brains. Not only does play influence thinking and
analysis, but it also influences adolescent human brain development. Recent neurological
research strongly supports the link between play and cognitive development (Frost, 1998)
and that children who have had no experience in play suffer cognitive development
(Bodrova & Leong, 1996). Sutton-Smith (1998), when commenting on the drop in the
number of synaptic connections from the age 10 months to age 10 years, from