Play: The Kindergartners' Perspective

Play and flow: Children’s culture and adults’ role

“…It is not necessary to assign other value or meaning to play. In this perspective, any type of play which is free from adult interference and involvement is valid and accepted (King, 1979). As a matter of fact, from this perspective, play is seen as such a natural phenomenon that school, as a structured context, cannot be seen as a place for play (Kuschner, 2012).…”

Recontextualizing the curriculum

“…For example, recent studies of children's definitions of work and play in school indicate that children's definitions are derived entirely from these two related contexts (King, 1979(King, , 1983. Young children rely on the social context of their activities as the source of their definitions.…”

New wine in old bottles

“…Of course, the term naturalistic is a red flag. Whether the setting is a preschool, a bedroom, a playground, a beach, or a forest; whether the child is alone, with peers, or with adults, settings are touched in numerous and different ways both by the notions of adults (parents, teachers, priests, and police), of what should or should not occur, and by children's notions of what these adult notions are (Fein, 1983;King, 1979). The studies described in this volume are conducted in settings that were more or less familiar to the children, containing either adult or peer companions, presenting more or less ambiguous adult roles, and involving an adult presence more or less explicit with respect to the organization of material things and social rules.…”

“…Before this issue is approached, we need to be clear about what we mean by natural science and what we hope to achieve by the study of imaginative play. Philosophers of science have come to distinguish between general models of scientific activity, and how practicing scientists think about both what they do, and what they seem indeed to do (Kuhn, 1962;Polanyi, 1946). Yet, even as philosophers debate the foundations of natural science, the meaning of objectivity, and assumptions about a real world, scientific achievements of immense significance continue to be made, as if the enterprise itself were unperturbed by philosophical dilemmas.…”