Free Play Research Paper

Words: 748
Pages: 3

reasoning skills. This includes repetitive muscle movements to explore the environment

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