Understanding the Art of Play
When I meet up with my families for a session, in-person or tele-practice, we spend our time playing. Play is the work of children. It is the way they learn about the world and how to interact with others. One of the things I bring up frequently in these sessions is “joint attention.” If you and your child are not attending to the same thing, learning is not taking place.
There are a couple of ways to get joint attention during play.
There are challenges with both of these approaches.
Whatever choice you make for your purposeful play time, there are a couple of things you need to always have in place.
Are you familiar with the stages of play? From birth to two, children primarily engage in solitary play. They explore the way their bodies move and how they can interact and manipulate objects in their environment. Around two years of age children transition to spectator play. They may watch what you are doing before trying it themselves or returning to their own activity. Spectator play merges into parallel play. That is, the child is willing to play alongside others even though they may not be willing for anyone to join in with them in a specific activity. Between three and four, children engage in associative play. They play with others happily in an unscripted way, joining in activities based on their own interests. Around four, children begin true cooperative play where they script play scenarios and communicate with one another about their activities. Take into consideration both your child's chronological age and his/her hearing age and choose which stage you think your child can handle. Remember, for your child to learn, there does need to be joint attention.
This sounds like a lot to think about, just to play! However, the good news is that as humans, we are innately social creatures. We want to communicate with each other. We want attention, and we are hard wired to seek those opportunities. Your child needs you and wants you. Your Listening and Spoken Language professional should be able to help you establish joint attention with your child whatever his /her age and stage so you can engage in successful play routines.
When I meet up with my families for a session, in-person or tele-practice, we spend our time playing. Play is the work of children. It is the way they learn about the world and how to interact with others. One of the things I bring up frequently in these sessions is “joint attention.” If you and your child are not attending to the same thing, learning is not taking place.
There are a couple of ways to get joint attention during play.
- One is to follow the child’s lead. That is developmentally appropriate. The child moves from activity to activity as he chooses, and we try to meet him there where we engage in “purposeful interaction” to accomplish our listening and language goals.
- The second way is we remove objects of distraction and provide a few toys that we think the child will enjoy, and we offer them in a vacuum so here is not much else to do.
There are challenges with both of these approaches.
- If we are following the child’s lead, we may end up chasing him from activity to activity as his attention span is brief. Even if he is really interested in an activity, he may walk away from it the minute we insert ourselves and ask for a vocalization.
- If we provide activities for him, he may just say “no, bye bye!” That means you need to be prepared with lots of different things to do, stored out of sight!
Whatever choice you make for your purposeful play time, there are a couple of things you need to always have in place.
- First, you need to have specific goals or targets. For example, are you working on sounds, word approximations, two-word combinations, phrases? Are you working on learning a new vocabulary word? (If so, plan an activity in which the child will interact with that word at least 22 times!) Are you going for a specific grammatical structure such as a pronoun like my/mine or a negative like don’t? Are you working on listening skills such as identifying a song or animal sounds or following a direction? Know your targets. Bombard the child with that target as you play! At the same time, be flexible to understand an unexpected target the child might be providing you. For example, if a child becomes fascinated by a dump truck and only wants to find and name them, then go with it. Introduce other vehicles and say, “Not a dump truck, firetruck.” Use the power of his interest to make an easy gain!
- The second thing you need to keep in mind is the developmental stages of play. They are outlined below. If you can work within your child’s age-appropriate play stage, you are in a better position. However, in “purposeful play” we are often pushing the child ahead of his natural stage in order to get the opportunities for intervention we are seeking. That is ok to a point, as long as we can keep it fun. Children are flexible, but if your child rebels, just take a look at the activity, your interaction and your child ‘s developmental stage and be patient and inventive.
Are you familiar with the stages of play? From birth to two, children primarily engage in solitary play. They explore the way their bodies move and how they can interact and manipulate objects in their environment. Around two years of age children transition to spectator play. They may watch what you are doing before trying it themselves or returning to their own activity. Spectator play merges into parallel play. That is, the child is willing to play alongside others even though they may not be willing for anyone to join in with them in a specific activity. Between three and four, children engage in associative play. They play with others happily in an unscripted way, joining in activities based on their own interests. Around four, children begin true cooperative play where they script play scenarios and communicate with one another about their activities. Take into consideration both your child's chronological age and his/her hearing age and choose which stage you think your child can handle. Remember, for your child to learn, there does need to be joint attention.
This sounds like a lot to think about, just to play! However, the good news is that as humans, we are innately social creatures. We want to communicate with each other. We want attention, and we are hard wired to seek those opportunities. Your child needs you and wants you. Your Listening and Spoken Language professional should be able to help you establish joint attention with your child whatever his /her age and stage so you can engage in successful play routines.