by Claire Beaumont

Created on: January 25, 2007   Last Updated: May 21, 2007

The significance of play in the early years:
Play is a significant part of a child's education because it has been found to facilitate their acquisition of knowledge, which is their learning. To validate this statement, it is important to look at the way inwhich a child learns:

Children and their learning:
The theorists, Piaget, and Vygotsky, both had views on the significance about the role of play and learning in the early years, and both found it to be a crucial part of a child's development. Piaget's idea of self discovery proposed that children needed minimal adult interactions to help them learn through life, this was his lone scientist theory' (Lindon 2001). He believed that the children tried, without adult help, to make sense of the world and understand what was going on around them. He had similar thoughts on his theory of child language acquisition. Not only this, but he had a notion that play was a window that reflected the goings on in the life of a child. However, Vygotsky argued differently. He proposed that children are social learners, and liked to explore and discover new things with the help of adults, not without. This was his scaffolding theory and the zone of proximal development', the ZPD (Whitebread, 2003). Furthermore, Bruner argued that when the children are older they stop learning new things, and start to build on what they already know (Lindon, 2001). If children were left to teach themselves, as Piaget suggests, the children may not learn all they need to know, such as Maths. The subject of Maths needs adult interaction and teachings thus making sure that the children understand correctly, and that the necessary information is being learnt. Furthermore, some children, even in a play situation, will continually return to the same area and objects because it is their comfort zone. Evidently this way the child will fail to benefit from the learning environment.

Therefore:
Researchers have found that children learn by interacting with their surroundings, and this can be seen in the way they play. Play allows children to be creative, to explore and investigate materials, to experiment and to draw and test their own conclusions (Abbot and Roger 1994). However, there are theorists, such as Smith (1986), who believe that play is not essential in the learning environment.

'while play is likely to have benefits, it is unlikely that they are essential. Rather these benefits could be achieved in a number of ways, of which play could be one' Smith,

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