Child Directed Play Essay

Early years setting such as Rainbows End Nursery follows a curriculum made for all early years settings therefore for the setting there are legal requirements that they have to meet. These include the requirements for young children to carry out most of their learning throughout play and play based activities. Likewise this links towards gaining knowledge from play towards their five areas of development; social, emotional, physical, cognitive, language and communication. For example filling up jugs with different measurements will allow the children to improve within their mathematics with these materials to understand concepts such as ‘full, empty, half full etc.

Although both child-initiated and adult directed play activities are very important

For example if a child is building a building block tower the adult should not come across and suggest them to build something else. To support child- directed play the adult has to observe what the child/ children are doing and stand or sit near them although they are not able to interfere. Therefore if the adults do disturb the children by interfering it will make them become less confident and lack in self-esteem due to the fact that an adult has interrupted and told them to do something different. This makes the child feel that they have done something wrong therefore they will lack in trying new ideas again for themselves, in case they feel they do it wrong this works out as a disadvantage for all five areas of development for this particular child. Whereas an adult also has to act interested and praise the children instead of lowering their self-esteem. For example saying ‘wow that is a big tower I wish I could do that, well done’. This allows the child to feel good about them and often they will go back to building one again another day as they feel that they did well and what to do good again to be praised more. Although if the adults lack in getting interested within the task and not praising the child when they build something alone for example the child will begin to feel that they are not happy as they feel alone at school due