PEDAL Hub Library

The World’s Children – their lives, their futures, the World at Play. A collection of news related to children’s play curated by Fair Play for Children, a registered Charity.

This is a free teacher’s handbook based on the work of Dr David Whitebread, Dr Marisol Basilio, and their team. You can view the handbook via the link provided below. To find out more about the PLaNS project, click here: https://goo.gl/Wk9aef Linked with PEDAL, the overall aim of the PLaNS project was to investigate the influence that a playful learning approach could have on 5-10 year olds’ narrative and writing skills. Being able to construct a clear narrative, in fictional form as a story, or in a non-fictional form as a descriptive account or a set of instructions, is a crucial skill, within educational contexts and beyond. There is a major concern that many children do not master these skills as well as they might, having implications for their oral and written narrative skills, and on aspects of their text comprehension (for example, the ability to identify the main points in a story or a factual text). Using LEGO sets, primary school teachers had free rein to develop playful activities to inspire children’s narratives and writing during a full academic year. Children worked together in groups to create stories and develop their writing in several ways – through comic strips, movies, 3D storyboards and more besides. The PLaNS research team evaluated children at the beginning and end of the school year to measure the impact of this teaching approach on a range of skills: writing, oral narrative skills, vocabulary, self-regulation and creativity. Children and teachers were also observed in the classroom throughout the academic year, and interviewed by the research team in order to understand learning experiences from the participant’s perspective.

The University of Cambridge and the LEGO Foundation has explored how learning through play helps children develop better writing skills. You can read about the project in more detail here: https://goo.gl/Wk9aef

Part of the seminar on the relationships between dialogue and children’s self regulation, July 2016

The Handbook of the Study of Play brings together in two volumes thinkers whose diverse interests at the leading edge of scholarship and practice define the current field. Because play is an activity that humans have shared across time, place, and culture and in their personal developmental timelines—and because this behavior stretches deep into the evolutionary past—no single discipline can lay claim to exclusive rights to study the subject. Thus this handbook features the thinking of evolutionary psychologists; ethologists and biologists; neuroscientists; developmental psychologists; psychotherapists and play therapists; historians; sociologists and anthropologists; cultural psychologists; philosophers; theorists of music, performance, and dance; specialists in learning and language acquisition; and playground designers. Together, but out of their varied understandings, the incisive contributions to The Handbook take on vital questions of educational policy, of literacy, of fitness, of the role of play in brain development, of spontaneity and pleasure, of well-being and happiness, of fairness, and of the fuller realization of the self. These volumes also comprise an intellectual history, retrospective looks at the great thinkers who have made possible the modern study of play.

Play is viewed as central to learning in the early years despite a lack of empirical evidence to support this. Most research has concentrated on adult definitions of play which fail to capture the intrinsic quality of playfulness. To achieve this it is necessary to elicit children’s definitions of play. The research discussed in this paper utilises children’s definitions of play to create formal and playful practice conditions to demonstrate the links between playfulness and learning. In addition, analysis of videotaped observations indicates behavioural differences according to whether children participate in playful or formal practice conditions. These findings support a behavioural threshold and fluency theory of play. Children in the playful condition exhibited more fluent and purposeful problem solving behaviours than children in the formal condition. Implications for practitioners in educational settings are outlined.