brincadeiras para crianças terapia

ix

Introduction

Edward F. Zigler, Dorothy G. Singer, and Sandra J. Bishop-Josef

ouis and Jarrett are sitting in a large box. They are playing fishing and thebox has become their boat. They decorated this box with magic markers,using many colors. With their teachers help, they fashioned a fishing pole,

using Legos and a long string attached to one end. The boys sail out to sea andtake turns catching the fish. When a storm comes, we hear much giggling and sillynoises as their boat begins to rock back and forth.

These friends are having fun doing what seems to come naturally to most chil-dren. They are playing make-believe. In the course of their play, they cooperate,share, take turns, talk to each other when they disagree, but most of all, they are hav-ing fun. Unfortunately, many children do not play as imaginatively as these boys.However, with the help of teachers, parents, or other caregivers, children can learnhow to play and, as they engage in their pretend games, develop many of the skillsthey will need for entry into kindergarten.

What do we mean by pretend play and why is this concept so important? JeanPiaget, the prominent Swiss psychologist, defined the various kinds of play in hisclassic book, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (1962). Play, according toPiaget, takes many forms. Symbolic play, the kind of play we allude to in this book,refers to play during which the child may be using objects in the environment in away that is quite different from the actual purpose of the object. A broom becomes ahorse, a banana becomes a telephone, and clay becomes a cookie. These objects areused with no other purpose than to evoke a new organized memory structure, whichpsychologists call a schema or idea. Symbolic play can be a familiar activity that isperformed in a different situation but without the right equipment or tools. It caninvolve something illogical and impossiblepirates who sail away after their boatsinks, or it can involve simply feeding a doll with a little stick as the spoon, or role-playing a princess or an astronaut.

The peak period for symbolic play is between the ages of 3 and 5 years whenchildren are heavily involved in pretend games and when many of these children areeither in day care centers or with homecare providers. Symbolic play continues until

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Copyright 2006 ZERO TO THREE. All rights reserved. Please note: This is a read-only copy.

x Introduction

approximately 7 years of age when the demands of school begin to replace the pretend-play periods in a childs life. Fortunately, play can continue beyond the set stages discussed by Piaget and can be practiced throughout the lifespan.

Sensory-motor play, which precedes this stage of symbolic play, starts at birthand persists to about 24 months. During this period, infants repetitively imitate thesounds and actions of people around them. The smiles of the caregiver serve to rein-force the childs behavior, even when the imitated acts have no real meaning for thechild. The child who waves and says bye-bye as someone enters a room may seemquaint to us, but only later as the toddler reaches the symbolic stage of play will thewords and movements match appropriately.

The last period of play that Piaget describes is the period from the age of about7 years until age 15 when games with rules predominate. These include board games(e.g., checkers and chess) or other games that require a partner and that entail somecompetition and adherence to the rules.

This book was written in response to the apparent policies of the George W.Bush administration, that play is no longer a viable means for learning and that timespent in free play could be used to study phonics. As the readers will discover in thefollowing chapters, the writers present both theoretical and practical aspects of play.A strong case is made for the continued encouragement of imaginative play in pre-school because of the many benefits derived from that play and the relationship ofthose benefits to school readiness skills.

This books opening chapter by Edward Zigler and Sandra Bishop-Josef reviewsthe policies of the George W. Bush administration and the administrations emphasison cognitive development and literacy, which neglect the importance of play as amajor contributor to a childs intellectual, social, emotional, and physical develop-ment. The authors indicate that this narrow emphasis on cognitive development, asopposed to the whole child approach, has serious implications for early childhoodcenters, including those supported by the private sector and those such as Head Startthat are funded by the government.

The Zigler and Bishop-Josef chapter discusses the No Child Left Behind Act of2001 and its thrust toward literacy training as well as the introduction of phonics inthe early grades. Head Start, for example, is requiring that directors no longer usefree play periods in the traditional manner of allowing children simply to choose thetoys and activities they prefer. Instead, as many of the other authors in this book havenoted, the focus has shifted to a strong emphasis on preliteracy, encouraging childrenthrough formal instruction to learn their letters and to use phonics as part of readingreadiness. A House bill reauthorizing Head Start (H.R. 2210) includes provisions forassessments that will determine whether children meet specified goals on preliteracyand pre-math tests. The chapter authors deem the current attack on play as a stepbackward in our nations history.

Ross Thompsons chapter 2 introduces the notion of the growth of the brainfrom the first month after conception (experience-expectant) and its continuousdevelopment throughout our lives (experience-dependant). Many researchers

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finally are acknowledging the fact that substantial changes occur in the human brainwell beyond early childhood and that this information about brain plasticity needs tobe made available to parents and teachers in a more accessible format. Thompsondescribes and gives examples of the growth of the body (physical size, motor coor-dination, health); the growth of the mind (thinking, language, concepts and problemsolving); the growth of the person (relationships, social understanding, emotions);and the growth of the brain (development of neurons, synapses, and the influence ofexperience on brain growth).

Sensitive periods do exist for the development of sensory or motor systems suchas vision and first-language acquisition, but the stimulation children need for thisdevelopment is generally present in most reasonable human environments. There-fore, it is important to ascertain through early physical examinations that childrenseyes and ears are functioning in a normal way, one of the benefits provided poor chil-dren participating in the Head Start program.

Thompson is a strong advocate of the need for caregivers to interact with chil-dren to provide the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional support they need. Headvocates affordable and desirable child-care arrangements and decent wage poli-cies. Parents need to obtain both prenatal and postnatal health care to screen childrenfor developmental difficulties. Finally, Thompson points out that school readinessnot only is a matter of promoting literacy and number skills but also is an issue of paramount importance for preschool teachers as they help children gain self-confidence, self-control, the ability to cooperate and to foster curiosity, and theeagerness to learn.

In chapter 3, Marilyn Segal sets the scene for the numerous definitions of playthat are discussed by other authors in this book and discusses the value of play forlearning. She offers the reader a clear description of the kinds of environments thatare developmentally appropriate for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers and that areconducive to play. These young children need to form secure attachments in theirearly years, but in addition, the adults in their lives need to be continuously nurturingand interactive to encourage play. By outlining examples of simple games and sug-gestions for play scripts, she presents some practical tips on how the parent andteacher can extend and enrich childrens play. The vivid vignettes she presents for thevarious kinds of play emphasize the important role that language takes in fosteringthematic play and in the expanding complexity of role play wherein children enact afamiliar or imaginary theme and sustain this theme for long periods.

Play, as Segal postulates, provides opportunities for children not only to feelgood about themselves, but also to handle fears, anxieties, and unpleasant experi-ences. Her examples clarify for the reader how play is vital for helping children dealwith the negative emotions. Segal stresses the fact that play affords children a senseof power when they reverse the roles of parent and child in their pretend games.

Brian Vandenberg, in chapter 4, reviews some of the reasons proposed by Piagetand Freud for why children play and the assumptions of these two men that thegrowth of reason results in the disappearance of play as an important factor inthought. Although Freud believed that play is a mastery of past traumatic events,

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Vandenberg suggests that childrens fantasy play is an expression of the humancapacity to create imaginary worlds that structure, energize, and give meaning toexperience. He claims that children are capable of distinguishing what is play fromwhat is not play but that they may have more difficulty than a sophisticated adult intheir interpretation of what is real and not real. Not until adolescence can the childtruly understand the difference between reality and fantasy, and only then does playbecome more realistic, rule-bound, and rational.

Play is also shaped by cultural factors. As mothers move into the workplace, thedemand is increasing for younger children to be subjected to rigorous tutoring toprepare them for the necessary skills of academic survival. According to Vanden-berg, play is an attractive solution to this dilemma. He calls attention to the playcurriculum concept involving toys that are carefully selected, activities that areplanned, and adult tutoring and guidance that have specific goals. Vandenberg, how-ever, warns of the danger that concern for imparting educational lessons in playdestroys the childs freedom, joy, and passion realized at the boundary of real andnot real.

Chapter 5 by Sharon Kagan and Amy Lowenstein begins with a discussion oftwo constructs, readiness for learning and readiness for school. The former notionapplies to children at all ages and the latter to young children at the preschool orkindergarten level. The former approach views the content of early education as fluidand evolving and the latter as more static and fixed. The authors discuss maturationalreadiness, acknowledging that all children do not develop at the same pace and thatall will not attain school readiness at the same time. Recently, the authors claim thisconcept has been criticized for its influence in preventing many needy children fromenrolling in kindergartens that might foster, rather than deter, their development.

Kagan and Lowenstein continue their chapter with a discussion of the goals ofthe National Education Goals Panel and the Technical Planning Groups report in1995, which outline the five dimensions of readiness that evolved from the input ofmany scholars and from decades of research. The five dimensions include (a) physi-cal well-being and motor development, (b) social and emotional development, (c)approaches toward learning, (d) language development, and (e) cognition and gener-al knowledge. The authors also relate research to these dimensions. Included in theirchapter is a brief historical and theoretical perspective on play. The chapter ends withan interesting question, which asks whether or not play is the preferred or the exclu-sive pedagogy to accelerate childrens learning.

Jerome Singer and Mawiyah Lythcott begin chapter 6 with an attempt to placesymbolic and sociodramatic play into a more basic framework within general psy-chology. They draw upon the analyses of learning by renowned cognitive psycholo-gists John Anderson, Lynn Reder, and the Nobelist Herbert Simon, who have exam-ined the relative values of formal drill compared with a more constructivist, wholechild orientation in literacy acquisition. Without denying the usefulness of repeti-tion and rote memory for some phases of early learning, modern cognition researchalso points to the value of symbolic representations and schema or script formationsin the development of efficient retrievable knowledge. Singer and Lythcott then pro-

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ceed to show how both spontaneous and guided play activities fostered by teacherscan fulfill a valuable role in developing schemas and scripts as organized mentalstructures for early literacy, emotional readiness, and Robert Sternbergs research-based conception of effective intelligence.

Childrens eagerness for storytelling makes it possible for teachers and parentsto tell tales, read, or foster playlets to help children acquire a variety of new schemasand to motivate them to play and replay new vocabulary, counting opportunities, andnew kinds of social interaction. The fun of playing leads children to engage in spon-taneous drill activities that can provide the repetitive practice that learningresearch also suggests is necessary for forming associative mental structures. Theauthors review in detail actual research studies that provide evidence that classroomsociodramatic play can foster impulse control, self-regulatory skills, and curiosityfor new knowledge. The authors review the findings of Sternberg who has proposedthat effective school or day-to-day intelligence involves not only the analytic skills oftraditional IQ measures but also practical and creative abilities. Imaginative play isespecially relevant to foster the more creative facets of intelligence.

Chapter 7 by Kathleen Roskos and James Christie analyzed 20 investigations ofthe relationship between play and literacy, examining how the problem was formed,what path the solution took, what claims were made, and what evidence supportsthese claims. Before they describe their analyses in detail, the authors review theresearch on play and literacy. They comment on the notion that emergent reading ispredicted by childrens ability to talk about language using metalinguistic verbs suchas talk, write, and read. They also accept Vygotskys construct of the zone of proxi-mal development and the idea that adults or older siblings who are involved withyoung children as mediators can foster the amount of literacy-related play.

Rather than use a technical explanation that focuses on the integrity of theresearch design, the validity of statistical findings, and the effect sizes, Roskos andChristie emphasize first analyzing the definitions, explanations, and solutions putforth as conceptualizations and then challenging them. They judged that only 12 ofthe 20 studies demonstrated sound research. These particular studies supplied evi-dence that play can be an aid to literacy in the following ways: (a) providing settingsthat promote literacy activity, skills, and strategies; (b) serving as a language experi-ence that can build connections between oral and written modes of expression; and(c) providing opportunities to teach and learn literacy.

Table 1 in the chapter presents a good summary of the characteristics of the 20reports. The authors indicate that, for most of the research reports they reviewed,play is a fuzzy construct with varying definitions. The research reports were moreexplicit in their definitions of literacy. Literacy is confined to a narrower strip ofactivity that involves primarily reading and writing where children scribble, theypretend to read and respond to books read to them, and they print. Literacy is con-fined by these researchers to print-based experiences. A general consensus suggeststhat the play environment can be engineered to enhance the literacy experiences ofyoung children. Sociodramatic play was found to be particularly useful for moreadvanced syntactic utterances and sentence expansions that are linked to reading

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success. The authors conclude their chapter with suggestions for future research onplay and literacy, and they offer ideas of how educators and parents can help to pro-mote this connection.

Play, according to Barbara Bowman in chapter 8, consists of personal character-istics, intelligence, and social components. Play helps children to cope with feelingsand to make sense of what they know and what they are trying to know. Bowmantraces the development of play from infants exploration of their own and of theircaregivers bodies to repetitive games, then to manipulative games, and eventually tosocial dramatic play followed by games of rules. Bowman is sensitive to the culturalaspects of play and reveals that, despite the diversity of cultures, play is quite similaracross cultures. Bowman suggests that children in many cultures, chase, rough-house, explore, fantasize, practice, create, play games with rules. Nevertheless, wemust be cautious in interpreting the play behavior in different cultures. The strategiesused by parents in their encouragement of their childrens play may vary, as can theform of play, the amount of time spent on play, and what actually is called play in anauthoritarian culture or in a democratic culture.

Bowman describes and gives examples of five psychological perspectives thathave influenced programs for young childrens care and education: maturation-oriented, behavioral, constructivist, psychodynamic, and sociocultural. She thenreviews how numerous preschools have moved away from the play tradition, increas-ing didactic instruction or eliminating or reducing free play. Many of these programsoriginally were designed for low-income children but gradually infiltrated to otherprograms for children regardless of socioeconomic class. Bowman cites the standtaken by the National Association for the Education of Young Children opposing theprograms that are laden with direct instruction to the detriment of play. At the end ofher chapter, Bowman makes a strong case for the education of teachers. A relation-ship is evident not only between a mothers education and a childs achievement butalso between the teachers education and a childs achievement in school.

An important contribution to this book is made in chapter 9 by Carollee Howesand Alison Wishard in their discussion of culture and shared pretend play. By sharedplay, the authors mean the mutual understanding of the goals and the sequence ofbehaviors within an action sequence as well as the social skills that are needed toreverse the actions of the partner while establishing mutual gaze. Shared meaningplay is also called complementary and reciprocal play. Social pretend play involvesthe idea of pretend within the shared meaning. To develop shared fantasy or sharedpretend play, the children who are play partners must integrate their emerging under-standing of pretend and their emerging social interaction. According to the authors,social pretend play is easier to achieve if a more knowledgeable partner such as amother, teacher, or older sibling plays along with the toddler or young preschooler.

Howes and Wishard discuss the meaning of proto-narratives, the very short sto-ries, sometimes only two utterances long, about childrens routine experiences. Chil-dren who are just learning to talk produce proto-narratives. Social pretend play andproto-narratives offer children opportunities to discuss meaning with a partner.Although cooperative social pretend play can be enacted without any verbal

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exchanges, pretend play that involves verbal negotiation offers children the opportu-nity to jointly construct narratives. Narrative development is consistent in structurewith written stories and helps children move toward reading comprehension and laterliteracy development. Early childhood teachers have encouraged children to makeand illustrate their own books based on the stories they enact in their social pretendplay. The teachers, of course, write down the stories, read them to the children, andencourage the parents to read these books at home. An alternative, which also can bean addition to this approach, is for teachers to provide more encouragement toengage the children in social pretend play. Nevertheless, the authors have found thatsocial pretend play in community-based child-care centers in the Los Angeles areahas decreased between 1982 and 2002. This decrease is consistent with anecdotalreports indicating that other early child-care centers are providing little unstructuredtime for children to play. The chapter includes a description of cases involving threedifferent centers serving (a) Mexican children, (b) African-American children, and(c) Spanish-speaking and Chinese children.

In summary, the authors suggest that narratives and proto-narratives as well associal pretend play with peers are important factors in emergent literacy. Culturalpractices suggest that pretending occurs outside of the home, with older childrenbeing responsible for the toddlers. They contend that community cultural practicesmust be considered with respect to shared meanings, whether in narratives or insocial pretend play.

Sue Bredekamps chapter 10 outlines the brief history of the concept of schoolreadiness, which first reached national prominence in 1990 when President GeorgeH. W. Bush and the 50 governors established the National Education Goals Panel. Inthe following year, five dimensions related to ready to learn were identified: (a)language use, (b) cognition and general knowledge, (c) physical health and well-being, (d) social and emotional development, and (e) approaches to learning. In2001, Head Start expanded these dimensions to include mathematics, science, andcreative arts.

Kindergarten teachers generally were in agreement with these goals as docu-mented in a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education. Fewer than 20%of kindergarten teachers, however, believed that it was essential for children enteringkindergarten to count to 20, have good problem solving skills, use a pencil, or knowletters of the alphabet. They were in favor of children possessing language abilities,being eager to learn, and regulating their behaviors in group settings as the majordeterminants of school readiness. The research indicates that, contrary to what teach-ers believe is most important for children entering kindergarten, those children whohave skills in letter recognition, phonological awareness, and overall language abili-ty are more likely to succeed later on.

Bredekamp continues her discussion with a definition of play, stating that themost effective kind of play for enhancing school readiness is sociodramatic play thatis also imaginative or pretend play. The teacher is an important facilitator of socio-dramatic play. Teachers can provide time, space, and props for play. They act asobservers, stage managers, and co-players, but they must be careful not to intervene

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unnecessarily. They can provide a theme for the play, and as co-player, the teachercan scaffold language and intervene to support and extend the play. The author citesnumerous studies detailing the relationship between play and specific school readi-ness factors such as self-regulation, social skills, and language development.

The final chapter, 11, by Dorothy Singer and Jerome Singer reviews their playresearch carried out over a 5-year period with inner-city parents, teachers, and home-care providers. The studies were in response to surveys indicating that more than onethird of American children were entering school ill prepared. Another motive fordeveloping training procedures for adults stemmed from the indications received inmeeting with groups of inner-city parents that they were somewhat at a loss aboutengaging in pretend play with their preschoolers. Many parents reported that no onehad played with them in this fashion and that they needed to be convinced that make-believe play could be useful in helping their children prepare for school entry.

The authors developed a series of make-believe games that were then producedon a video with printed manuals to accompany them. Embedded in these games weresocial behaviors such as sharing, taking turns, cooperating, and using manners; cog-nitive skills such as recognizing numbers, colors, and shapes; and language skillssuch as gaining new vocabulary, recognizing letters and their sounds, and using lan-guage to express ideas.

An important feature of this series of studies was the involvement of the parentsand other adults as participants in the actual development of the videotapes.Although these parents were generally not highly educated, they became involvedquite readily in providing feedback on issues they thought would help other care-givers in using play to enhance school readiness. In some cases, through the focusgroups that met with the producers and researchers, new suggestions emerged forstory content that would be valuable in the videotapes. The caregivers rated the mate-rials as not only useful but also fun for them and the children and described them asleading to meaningful bonding experiences. Replication of the studies in varioussites around the country supported the findings. Results of the studies described inthis chapter indicated that a guided play approach led to improvements in an array ofcognitive and social skills in preschoolers. This chapter offers evidence that supportsthe suggestions made by the previous authors in this book concerning how importantan adult mediator can be as a partner in play.

Reference

Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

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