Play-Based Learning

Explain the role of play in literacy learning and examine its position in relation to society, the National Curriculum, and cultural issues. In what ways should early playful learning encounters be built upon in the context of schooling?

For e.g. adding Mr potato head to the water to enhance planning about parts of the body, leaving the children to use their imagination how to play with it. When children use their imagination adults only need to intervene when asked or if we see something not suitable.

Children are no longer encouraged to be creative in the test prep environment. Instead, they are being taught to perform well on standardized tests and are labeled as unintelligent if they don’t. Young children are born with creativity and we see that when they are playing and pretending. According to Sir Ken Robinson, in Slon’s (2013) article, “by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity” to be creative. The fundamentals of creation and experimentation are not part of the standardized testing mechanism.

Kaufman and Beghetto (2014) further suggest that creativity can be fostered in children to a certain extent by providing them with opportunities to express their own unique ideas.

3. Critically analyse how creativity and creative learning can support young children’s emotional, social, intellectual, communication and physical development.

Children’s creativity must be extended by the provision of support for their curiosity, exploration and play. They must be provided with opportunities to explore and share their thoughts, ideas and feelings, for example, through a variety of art, music, movement, dance, imaginative and role-play activities, mathematics, and design and technology.

Creativity is about risk taking and making connections, allowing children to explore and express themselves through a variety of media or materials including, dance, music, making things, drawing, painting and make believe and to make new things emerge as a result. Being creative is strongly linked to play and can emerge through a

Creative development is important to a child’s learning because it helps them to use their mind and imagination and express their own ideas, and through playing with their friends it also helps them to understand that all family’s and cultures can be different. It helps them to make connections in their thinking and the way in which they problem solve, by doing things over and over again they reinforce their thinking and learning, they develop self-esteem, confidence, imagination & learning to work together in groups. It puts down the foundations for more

Creativity is about risk taking and making connections, allowing children to explore and express themselves through a variety of media or materials including, dance, music, making things, drawing, painting and make believe and to make new things emerge as a result. Being creative is strongly linked to play and can emerge through a child being absorbed in their own actions and ideas.

In order for children to be creative the environment and the experiences they are exposed to will determine their creative learning and creativity.  This is closely linked with cultural approaches and role modelling.

Throughout the article written by Matlock and Hornstein they discuss the importance of integrating arts and play into the curriculum of early childhood education. In the article written by Mindes, he discusses the position of social studies in the curriculum of early childhood education today. Matlock and Horstein converse about how humans use the arts make sense of the world along with figuring out their most sincere terrors and pleasures. On the other hand, Mindes tells us that social studies were formed to meet the educational needs of children. We can see that these two articles differ seeing that arts and play was meant to help humans figure out the world, while social studies were strictly meant for curriculum.

The era of accountability has heavily swayed public schools towards narrowing the curriculum across content and disciplines. Student test scores have become the measure in which states, districts, schools, classrooms, and teachers are deemed “excellent.” Also, many schools have been confronted with budget cuts that determine the content offered in schools. Unfortunately, arts programming across the United States’ K-12 public education has been minimized and/or not given the proper attention it deserves. To strengthen the argument for arts education, researchers have developed the integration of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to curriculum and lesson planning. I argue that the integration of the arts in classroom curriculum with early childhoods students can provide benefits not only for students but teachers. Arts education centers on allowing both students and teachers to engage in creativity and bring out their multiple intelligence. I recognize four reasons why arts education is a valuable tool with young children: (1) arts can be used across subjects and context (interdisciplinary), (2) it touches on the needs of different learners (multiple intelligence), (3) flexibility that allows creativity in the classroom, and (4) shifts away from traditional methods of rote learning.

Art, Dance, Drama and Music are an essential and fundamental role of Primary Education and the curriculum. Each one is a distinct subject in its own right, yet organised and termed under the same category of Expressive Arts (EA). EA is an area that is extremely encouraged within Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) as it offers breadth across the curriculum and supports children with a variety of stimulating activities to be inventive, innovative and to express feelings and emotions, both their own and those of their peers (Education Scotland, Undated a). Education Scotland (Undated b, p. 2) similarly suggests that EA play a vital role in molding our sense of our “personal, social and cultural identity,” as well as developing important skills exclusive

On Saturday 22nd, at seven in the evening, I attended an experiential learning called “Dreamplay.” The experiential learning was mostly a play composed of dreams the actors had. The project began somewhere around the beginning of September; they had to keep a dream diary that contained most of the dreams the actors remembered. The play began with a character that couldn’t dream, time would continue to pass and the character had trouble sleeping and dreaming. Not until another character presented “super dreamer hero,”assists the troubling male character that has trouble with sleep. He begins discussing the circadian rhythm, and how the hero would be willing to go back in time to gather all his dreams; the

Creativity is the ability to produce work that is original yet appropriate-something that others have not thought of but that is useful in some way (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2007; Sternberg, 2003b). The significance of creativity for children’s development is very high. Creativity helps children develop the overall areas of development; physical, social, emotional, language and cognitive. A child learns to innovate as well as invent while doing creative activities. Through creative practices child finds multiple methods of looking at various situations, assessing these situations and finding new solutions. Children often desire to be able to express themselves without any