The Importance of Play
I'm going to begin the session here today by talking about children's play. I feel that the early play of children, their make-believe activities, and the physical skills they develop, are really very critical for what you ultimately want to put into good programming, and also what you want parents to assist the child in developing. I'm going to focus primarily on children's play, and then Dorothy will lead more specifically into the relationship to television.

Four Types of Play
Let me begin by calling to your attention the four types of play that have been identified by developmental researchers in children.

Researchers have identified four types of play: sensory motor & exploratory play; skill mastery; symbolism & pretend; and games with rules.

The first is the simplest, sensory motor and exploratory play that you see in infancy and early childhood. In a sense we never lose that. Part of being human is to be curious and exploratory, as Mr. Orfalea suggested earlier. The second is skill mastery, when a child can do things over and over and gradually get better and better at doing it. Again we never lose this, although we carry it on in different forms. Third, there's symbolic and pretend play, which is what I'm going to focus on today - the make-believe elements, the pretend, the fantasy activities - the origins of our own ongoing conscious thought. Finally, there are games with rules – everything from Candy Land to Monopoly - which are important parts of socializing children into the law, you might say, and to some extent, even into capitalism, with its rules, and so on. Those are the basic forms of play.

Encouraging Play Time

	“Media influences can provide very valuable plot lines, story lines, but they can also be counter product-ive, which is a whole other lecture that I won't give today.”

Imaginative Play and Child Development
Imaginative play is part of the emergence of autonomy for a child. It is part of what we would call the first steps of a child. Here is a painting by Picasso, called “First Steps.” You'll notice this happy look on the child's face as a toddler, as it's taking its first steps.

“When kids start saying “no,” that is a tremendous step in terms of them asserting that they are now somewhat different from the people who hold them and feed them.”

Think of what a tremendous step that is for a child - the stepping out ahead and being now free. He doesn't have to be held all the time by the mother. He can now be free of the mother. Look at the mother's face, which is full of anxiety. Can she let go of the child or not? She has to be able to do that. My point is that first steps like this are tremendously important for children. Parents have to learn to recognize these. They have to be able to let go of the child to walk. They also have to learn that, for example, the “terrible two's” are not terrible. When kids start saying “no,” that is a tremendous step in terms of them asserting that they are now somewhat different from the people who hold them and feed them and so on. They are beginning to develop a sense of individuality.

When the child begins to say, let's make-believe, let's pretend, the child is creating a whole new world. It's gaining power through miniaturizing the complexity of the booming, buzzing world all around, reducing the big trucks and airplanes and cars to a miniaturized size that the child can control. That becomes the basis for the autonomy that we all experience in our thoughts and in our imagination.

I'm trying to hold your attention here as I'm talking, but I'm willing to bet that every one of you at some point has drifted away from what I'm saying to thoughts about your own personal life or about what you're going to be doing later on today or next year. You have an independent existence that's carried on privately in your own thoughts. We want to help children develop that in a constructive and useful way and not mock them for this. We have to convey to parents that they must be prepared to help and foster this development, which usually comes through the encouragement of imaginative play, symbolic play, pretend play in the child.

Advantages of Imaginative Play
Play is much mocked and even left out in lists of what children need for school readiness, because many people don't understand that through play there are tremendous opportunities.

Emotional Benefits: First of all, let's not forget the fact, that play is fun. The child creates a miniature alternative world that they can maneuver and play with, explore and discover. There's the feeling of power and, again, autonomy. There is also the development of empathy and sympathy. When you play games, sometimes you play the good kid and sometimes you’re the bad kid. Or you take a doll and you make-believe the doll won't go to sleep, so you put it to sleep properly.

Cognitive Benefits: At the cognitive level we know that children who play at make-believe a great deal are much more likely to develop richer vocabularies. They develop the use of the future tense – I'm going to do this tomorrow, or, this character is going to be going here... In our research we have found that when we score their language while they are engaged in such activity, we find increased complexity of language. We find they use new grammar forms and have learned to structure and develop elaborate narratives of all kinds.

Practicing imagery - the ability to think in your mind's eye, picture various settings and scenes in advance - is a very important human function. It's the key to effective, adaptive planning. The child needs help with developing it.

Around age four, children begin to recognize that their thoughts are not the same as those of other people, that people have different ways of thinking about things. This is a tremendous step forward.

Social Benefits: Children who engage in a lot of imaginative play can delay gratification. They can entertain themselves and they can plan effectively. They also can find alternatives to aggression.

Conclusion
Play is, therefore, a critical underlying part of the development of school readiness skills. As you go forward in the creation of KCEd, please remember that you need to make available opportunities for play within the programs and make clear to parents and caregivers that they must help foster play. A critical component of KCEd should be helping parents and caregivers understand the central role of children's play in their development and learning.

And you don't need elaborate help with play. A simple box in which a parent receives the gift of a refrigerator or an air conditioner elicits the exclamation of “Look,” from the child, “P.J., come and see what I have in my room. It's the best toy ever. It's a fort and a space shuttle and a bus and a pirate ship and a sled and a clubhouse and a castle all in one. And Mommy was just going to throw it away.” I have to say that we've observed many, many instances of where the box turns out to be the longest play object that a child has kept from Christmas.

I'll leave you with that, and hope that you can use your play in the future to help with the development of KCEd. Thank you.

Jerome Singer
June 13, 2003
KCEd Expert's Convening