Early Childhood Play Matters: Intentional teaching through play: Birth to six years

by Shona Bass, Shona Bass

In early childhood education, 'play-based learning' has long been the means of facilitating teaching and learning. The strongest platform for early years education is when children are deeply engaged in rich exploratory play experiences that have been intentionally planned and developed by the educator. Intentional teaching provides open-ended experiences with provocations to extend skills, learning, and understandings (in contrast to simply extending a children's interests). Early Childhood Play Matters concentrates on the most formative years of education (from birth to 6 years), where it all really begins with intentional, rich, and rigorous play-based opportunities for young children. The book builds upon the successful national and international work that the authors have brought in play-based curriculum in early and primary years through their previous Play Matters and Engagement Matters. The book provides the framework for educators to focus on the core role of building relationships with children and implementing a rich, intentional, play-based curriculum. It is full of practical ideas on setting up the play learning environment (indoors and outdoors), how to plan and document realistically in order to save time, and how to provide rich provocations for learning through play. It contains a full-color section of photographs and templates for planning, assessing, and reporting activities. [ Early Childhood Education]

112 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2015

Reviews

[Kirsty Bartlett · Rating 4 out of 5]

My main takeaway from this book is the absolute importance of trusting relationships with children, this being central to how they grow, develop and learn. It is also central to all behaviour management. I really enjoyed the chapter on emotional intelligence as being key to educators building relationships with children, in particular the point the author makes about the importance of knowing yourself, being able to reflect on your own behaviour and emotions, in order to reflect on those of others.
The other point she makes that I noted for me, was how and why we use children’s interests, that they are springboards for skill development, social and emotional development, and identify formation. They are merely there to hold the learning intentions that we are invested in teaching.