Children Play Observation

With increasing emphasis on early child development, play is without a doubt endangered in today's society. Academic development as we know is thought of as the key to success for a child, and the earlier the child is push to start, the more successful he will become. While this idea has completely rendered academia as the ideal way for a child to succeed, it completely undermined the importance and benefits of play. Play helps build characters, and by participating in play children are allowed the opportunity to develop their personality and a positive sense of self. This ultimately helps them realize their potential and allow the child to also succeed later on in life. Play is an essential in a child's life, and play is equally as important as academic in a child's life, but what is play? The following are real life situations where play is involved, and through this we will be able to pinpoint the importance of play and define the definition of play as applied in real life situations.

Everyday on my way to drop off my sibling at his school I noticed the many activities the kids, age range from 5 to 10, are participating in. It seems that before stepping into a classroom and before setting down to start on their academic schedule the kids are allowed thirty minutes of free play. While observing these children in play, I noticed many of these children are very energetic, be it playing on the swing or taking part in a basketball game, these children have an immense amount of energy and no child are sitting down, not doing anything, and of course everyone is laughing and having fun. This leads me to our first definition of play that is play is fun and absorbing. The children were so involved in play that they had lost track of time, as I recalled I even heard someone murmured "Aww its time to go in already". Because this type of play takes place from the very start of the day, we can relate this play to our oldest theory of play of "Surplus Energy Theory." This type of play takes on physical form through the basketball game or swinging on the swing already mentioned above. Surplus energy theory refers to the use of play to release the extra energy within the children. This theory as I had witness calms the individual child down which will allow the teachers as well as the children to effectively teach and learn, respectively.

The next location I observed was also at my sibling's elementary school, this time on my way to pick him up. On this trip one particular group of children caught my attention, their age ranges from 6 to 7. Each of these individual children, mainly boys, during their course of play used their imagination to create a unique "Super hero" figure for himself, and through their super hero strength they dueled. It was rather amusing seeing one super hero's punch sending another super hero flying, and the added special effects/noise the children made was awestruck. These children take their parts very serious, the emotions on each child's face and his facial expression matches with every hit he received from his opponent, seeing their play in action was actually very much like watching the latest cartoon or movie. This second observation lead me into my next point that is Play is make believe, a form of self expression that allow an individual to be whoever he or she want to be. Now-a-day the children's imagination is powered through the latest comic he or she read or the last Disney movie. Therefore we can relate this category of play into the Recapitulation theory. Recapitulation theory states that play is use to relive periods in history of the human species. The "history of the human species" in