Cognitive Perspectives
Piaget described qualitative changes to play over the early childhood period; he saw play development as a series of stages that paralleled the child’s increasing complexity of thought and reasoning. Practice play is characterized by reflexive, repetitive, or functional actions, as when a toddler pounds large pegs into a block of wood with matching holes. Also known as functional play, this type of activity takes place during the sensorimotor stage of development in infants and toddlers.
Symbolic play develops during the preoperational period from ages 2 to 7 but includes two distinct types of representational play. In the early part of this stage, children begin to use one thing to represent another, such as a block for a truck or, on the playground, wood chips and water to make soup in a bucket. A higher and more complex form of symbolic play occurs as 4- and 5-year olds begin to develop and engage in pretend play with roles and themes.
Play that focuses on games with rules emerges as children move from preoperational to concrete operational thinking. At the early part of this stage, children in kindergarten and first grade attempt to play games with rules, understanding their purpose but not necessarily the concept that for a game to work, all players must be using the same ones! For instance, while playing tag, with the very simple rule that when you are tagged you are out, different children may have very different ideas of what constitutes a “tag”one child may interpret a tag as a touch while another equates a tag with a tackle.
As they gain an understanding of the need for constancy, children embrace and enjoy all kinds of board and card games as well as sports and active games, and they make up games with their own rules. During this period, children also become consumed with the concept of fairness, since they often interpret what is fair according to their developing understanding of rules.