timBoucher » Developmental Stages of Play

Developmental Stages of Play

Okay, getting back to this whole thing about “child’s play“… Seems that Jean Piaget is the all-around most influential psychologist when you move into the area of children playing, and how the way that they play changes as the grow up. It’s pretty interesting.

Basically, it seems like you can break down the stages according to age groups, and the primary means children of each age group have of interacting with the world and with objects. The first of Piaget’s stages of play is sensorimotor. This basically that babies experiment with sensation and body movement. At first, the movement is more experimental and exploratory. Eventually, they start to develop “schemes” to create consistent movements. They will then start connecting these schemes into sequences of actions. These sequences eventually start to become more complex and differentiated based on whatever object(s) they may be interacting with.

I guess awareness of the different actions associated with objects is what helps push them into the next stage. This is symbolic play where they start to be able to use objects to signify other things. This is the point where “pretend play” starts to become really important, because they also start to be able to represent actual experience symbolically. This is the stage of social dramatic role-playing.

Playing with different roles teaches them to play cooperatively. This in turn moves children into playing based around games, and around rule systems. Younger children tend to play with very flexible rules, whereas older children’s games consist of much more rigid rules (ie, they become miniature adults!).

Anyway, that’s a pretty non-technical explanation of what Piaget was talking about. If you’re looking for something more complex and detailed, you can probably find it in one of these links below.