“Play is the beginning of knowledge.” ~ Anonymous
Are two quotes that I feel best defines play.
Children act out through play their life’s experiences. This was true in my childhood play as well. Going down my memory lane and trying to recollect my childhood days, I remember my favorite play was acting out the church scene. I used to dress up in a sari and pretend sitting in the church singing songs and acting out taking part in the Lord’s Table. I would get my younger brother to play along. If my cousins came over it was even merrier. My other favorite toy was the doll I had which used to go everywhere with me even to the grocery stores and on airplanes travelling across continents. My doll played various roles, if she was my student at one time, she would be my daughter for whom I had to cook with my cookery set and feed at another instance, or even my patient for whom I had to give injections to bring down the fever. I could stretch my imagination to far extents. As children progress their level of play also progresses. As I grew older, I enjoyed board games like monopoly and I still do (though I enjoy playing Cluedo now more than monopoly).
My parents were a great support, such that my mother used to go to the sari shop and get the cut remaining pieces of the sari material left for me to play (for those who don’t know what a sari is – Indian women wrap a 6 meter long material that either comes as a single piece or in a roll which has to be cut as per the meter one would require depending on the way it is worn). My father was always ready to buy me toys and even play with me games like carrom board or take me driving in the car with me on his lap where I would soon be imagining myself driving away to my fantasy land. My only sibling, my brother who enjoyed playing with his match box cars, would succumb to my desire to play house or church or whatever my girlish ideas would direct. We would go down to front of the apartment which was all sand and build sand castles with our friends from the next house.
(Photos of myself in my childhood days with the play items that were most important to me – Sari and doll)
I feel much of that exploratory and creative play is lost in today’s technological world where even the very young children of today is hooked on to TV, computer games and the latest various different types of three dimensional interactive games like the Nintendo’s and Wii’s. These games may be engaging but it forces children to interact with virtual friends instead of other human children and therefore fail to build negotiation skills and social competence. Even at school, children are denied opportunities to play as more time is devoted to being taught and being tested. Many parents prefer greater importance on academic achievement and therefore teachers are pressurized to increase academic performance by reducing the time ‘wasted’ for play.
What is merely seen as ‘play’ actually helps develop the ‘whole child’. Therefore, we need to educate ourselves as well as the parents to relax and stop pressurizing their children. Children have a great potential for growth and learning. With little scaffolding from us as educators and setting the pace for learning so that it is consistent with the child’s development we can help them succeed. “The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.” ~ Plato (Greek philosopher). “It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” ~ D.W. Winnicott (British pediatrician)
