3.2 Promoting personal, social and emotional development through physical play
Babies develop relationships with their closest carers from birth. Through combinations of touch, gaze and sound, they form close attachments.
As children become independently mobile, opportunity for physical play enables them to develop wider social relationships. To participate successfully in physical play with others, children need to ‘tune in’ to each other’s body language, coordinate their movement and negotiate their ideas for the play to progress. So physical play is a hotbed for developing friendships.
Physical play also provides opportunities for children to discover and challenge their own physical capabilities. Developing the movement skills to climb up to a slide, kick a ball or up-end a bucketful of sand, for example, takes practice. Many children experience failure before they experience success, yet in playful, supportive environments many repeat the activity over and over again to achieve their goal and improve their skills.
Canning (2020) suggests that through social and physical play, children experience a sense of empowerment. As they interact with the environment, resources and other children in their play, they begin to understand that they influence the situations in which they are involved. They begin to understand their own self-efficacy. So physical play also builds perseverance, resilience, confidence and children’s self-esteem.
Activity 2
Watch the video below of children playing and think about how their movement is promoting motor skills, communication and language, and social and emotional development.
Transcript: Video 1
Think about the play you observed in the video and then decide how each statement below applies to the play you’ve watched:
- It applies to the play
- It partly applies to the play
- It does not apply to the play.
For some statements there is a clear answer, but others are more subjective. The purpose of the activity is to draw your attention to the many different aspects of learning and development that can be promoted through physical play.
1. The children are challenging themselves and testing their physical capabilities.
Comment
The children must use some force to roll the pipe and they comment that it is difficult. Yet, they manage well and so you could say there was some degree of challenge.
2. The children are using fine motor movement.
Comment
From what you can observe, the children are using gross motor movements here rather than manipulating resources with fine motor control.
3. The children are listening and responding to each other.
Comment
There is an example of children listening and responding to each other at the very beginning of the episode; child 1 comments, ‘it’s so hard isn’t it’ child 2 responds, ‘yeah, we need loads of people’.
4. The children are persevering.
Comment
You might have noticed that after joining the play inside the pipe, one child returns for another attempt at pushing and rolling it. So, you could say some perseverance is observable in this play.
5. The children are waiting for direction or help.
Comment
No adult or single child controls the play. The children all participate equally, and the play evolves spontaneously as the children follow their own ideas.
6. The children are using locomotive movement (movement involving travel from one place to another)
Comment
The children are pushing the pipe, running and crawling, and so are using different sorts of locomotive movement.
7. The children are coordinating their movements with one another.
Comment
You might have noticed that one child changes direction and reverses back out of the pipe as another child comes through.
8. The children are developing proprioception (perceiving self in space).
Comment
In this play, the children experience two very different spaces ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the pipe. They have to move differently in each space, and you can probably imagine that these two spaces have a very different ‘feel’. Did you also notice how they explore the sound of their voices inside the pipe?
9. The children are using specific vocabulary.
Comment
Did you hear children use words related to speed and position? For example, ‘get out quick’, ‘the other side’.
10. The children are taking turns, negotiating and cooperating with each other.
Comment
Without any verbal communication on the matter, the children all started going through the pipe the same way. They also worked together, pushing the pipe in the same direction.
11. The children are using gross motor movement.
Comment
There were many different types of gross motor movement in this play, for example pushing, running, crouching, crawling and a child sliding on his tummy.
12. The children are integrating information from all their senses.
Comment
In this play, the children were clearly integrating information from their senses of touch, hearing and vision. The different movements were also stimulating their vestibular system, developing their sense of balance and proprioception.