Guided play: from instructions to creativity when constructing automata

Neoliberal rationalities predicated on consumer choice and market forces have increasingly positioned parents as consumers in early childhood and care markets. In this context, providers jostle to attract clientele by providing pathways through and around a milieu of parental anxieties and ambitions for their children. This article examines a chief marketing document – the early childhood education and care provider’s website – and reflects on the ways providers address parental ‘play anxiety’ in marketised times. It finds that differing and even contradictory discursive ideals about children’s risky, risk averse and guided play move in and out of the texts in ways that work to appeal to parents’ anxieties and desires. The emergence of a mosaic of differing discourses of play in marking texts highlights the complexities and contradictions that come with early childhood education and care provision, parenting and growing up in marketised neoliberal times.

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Consistency and variability between cultures during toddlers’ naturalistic play

10.31234/osf.io/jqwr5 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Bria Long ◽

Patrick Wong ◽

Michael C. Frank ◽

Eva Lai ◽

Peggy Chan ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Empirical Studies ◽

Past Research ◽

The United States ◽

Free Play ◽

Wide Range ◽

Wide Variability ◽

Play Behaviors ◽

Audio Data ◽

Video And Audio ◽

Guided Play

Play is a universal behavior that is thought to be a critical way for children to learn a wide range of motor, social, and language skills. Empirical studies of play have borne out some of the predictions of classical theories, showing that children preferentially engage with surprising stimuli, will play in order to learn, and generally show a similar progression of increasingly-complex play behaviors through infancy. Past research has also characterized the types of support and guidance that parents offer during guided play with their child, as distinguished from individual free play. However, most of these studies come from Western nations, and relatively few cross-cultural comparisons have been made, despite observations of wide variability in cultural play traditions. The goal of this study is to examine the variability and consistency of play behaviors in a large sample of 1–2-year-old children—a critical period in the development of play behaviors—in two cultural contexts: the United States and Hong Kong. Our investigation covers both individual and guided play, with measures related to joint attention, stereotypical play behaviors, language use, and types of support offered by caregivers during guided play. This rich, annotated corpus of video and audio data also provides an important resource for research on early play.

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Erratum to: Chapter 5 Guided Play: A Solution to the Play Versus Learning Dichotomy

Evolutionary Psychology - Evolutionary Perspectives on Child Development and Education ◽

10.1007/978-3-319-29986-0_14 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. E1-E1

Author(s):

Tamara Spiewak Toub ◽

Vinaya Rajan ◽

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff ◽

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

Keyword(s):

Guided Play

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Can Guided Play and Storybook Reading Promote Children’s Drawing Development?

Empirical Studies of the Arts ◽

10.1177/0276237418777946 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 37 (1) ◽

pp. 32-59 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jeremy E. Sawyer ◽

Thalia Goldstein

Keyword(s):

Head Start ◽

Pretend Play ◽

Storybook Reading ◽

Relative Efficacy ◽

Head Start Program ◽

Spatial Complexity ◽

Five Dimensions ◽

Significant Growth ◽

Story Time ◽

Guided Play

Children’s drawings are implicated in their emotional, cognitive, artistic, and semiotic development, raising the question of how early educators may best facilitate drawing development. This study compared three activities to determine their relative efficacy in promoting children’s drawing. Seventy-seven preschoolers from a Head Start program were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: storybook reading, block building, or dramatic pretend play games (DPPG). Interventions were conducted over 8 weeks, and children’s free drawings during each session were rated on five dimensions: creativity, talent, spatial complexity, color, and human content. Taken together, the interventions produced significant growth in overall drawing, particularly for children who were initially more skilled at drawing. Comparisons indicated that storybook reading and block building generated significantly better overall drawing than DPPG. Story time was more beneficial than DPPG for creativity, talent, and spatial complexity, while block building was more beneficial than DPPG for children’s use of color.

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