“The years of early childhood are the most playful of all, for children spend most of their waking hours to play, acquiring the skills, ideas, and values that are crucial for growing up”(Berger, 1994, p. 209). Play lies at the heart of early childhood, it is a vital channel for children to attain knowledge, most of their learning takes place through play. In this essay firstly I will be discussing my early childhood play experience in China and different perspective of the play in New Zealand. Then I will explain how Piaget and Vygotsky’s theories on play is relevant to children’s holistic development. Practicum placement activities and my homestay’s little girl’s experiences will be used as example and links will be mode to Te …show more content…
So his thinking of play is based on his stage theory. During each of the stages he came up with three specific types of play. He emphasised that children learn by actively involving themselves in play and they attain knowledge through exploring, hence, children are expected to play independently.
According to Piaget (Berger, 1994), accommodation and assimilation are procedures for children to make sense of this world. Within this theory “Piaget described spontaneous play as a situation where assimilation predominates” (Docket and Fleer, 1999, p. 50). This process mostly reflect in symbolic play. When a little girl observes a cup cake, simultaneous, she assimilates what a cup cake looks like. Next time, she uses a box with scraps of paper as a cap cake. She fits a new object into the concept of cup cake, that means she assimilate the new object into her …show more content…
The major elements included in children’s play all relate to their own experience and their own social background. My homestay’s girl Abree always use a little box as a dish a food, and her mum do a lot of cooking at home and Abree is watching beside. When two children both pretend to be doctor, but they will ask the patient different things, give a different prescription. These according to different experience they have. “children internalize information or knowledge that is social or culturally transmitted” He emphasized children’s play need to within social and culture