Using Thematic Plays, Toys and Props in Preschool Education. Examples from Pedagogical Practice
Abstract
Play is a specific form of children’s activity which enables them to put into practice what they had observed, learned, and experienced. Furthermore, play creates the opportunity for children to broaden their range of experiences, and learn how to act and interact with their environment in a purposeful and effective way. While playing, children consolidate and enhance the acquired ways of thinking and acting, develop cognitive abilities, and enrich their knowledge of the world around them. Using a particular theme, children pretend to take on roles of adults, imitating their speech and actions, which provides an incentive to broaden the scope of knowledge about occupations and activities performed by various people, places and institutions where people work, and about social relations in which people engage. Through play, children accumulate experience, get to know the world around them, and acquire knowledge, which results in, among other things, the development of their capacity for analysis and synthesis, discovery of earlier unknown phenomena and the attempt to explain them. Props are an integral part of play. Children use ready-made toys or their substitutes; for example, a stick becomes a horse and a metal ring becomes a steering wheel of a car. The purpose of the research was to learn about the implementation of theme play in pedagogical practice in the preschool classroom of 4/5-year old children, and to identify toys and props used while playing. Thus, a two-stage qualitative research was performed in the municipal preschool located in the town of Biała Podlaska. The research findings indicated the need for teachers to prepare children for taking up thematic role play, to initiate play and introduce new themes previously unknown to children. Given the undeniable importance of theme play in the development of children, attention should be paid to thorough preparation of role-playing activities as a limited scope of implemented activities and themes, and the use of the same toys and props will certainly not provide additional developmental stimuli.
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