ABSTRACT

As practitioners and educators, we always tend to place and protect play as the first priority for our youngest children. We come to experience and understand the importance of play for children as the vehicle for so many cognitive, social and emotional, language and growth developments. From the valuable work we do with children, as well as the frameworks and guidelines that inform us in our work, play is paramount as the most effective way our children practise possibilities, revisit things they have experienced and reconcile and express how they feel about things. We have playtime, playgrounds, soft play, playrooms and play days. But all these things are adult words, from our adult perspectives and for our management of the time we spend with children, and not always purely for or led by children themselves. As adults we are desensitised from many of our own sensory messages, having seen, experienced or categorised what a specific sensation means previously. We do not always consciously register the location of an itch, we do not always see periphery items in our vision and, as adults, often take up hobbies that seek to reconnect us with our senses be they thrill-seeking, meditative or tactile. A baby’s senses are much more heightened than our own; they need to be to cope with the new environment they find themselves in. By reversing the order of play, imitation and exploration, we can, perhaps, highlight the links between the three more competently. If the newborn baby was born into a social vacuum, with its immediate biological needs taken care of and then left, it would have only its senses to rely on in order to explore its environment and to make sense of where it was. This would be a cruel and unimaginable thing to do, but it is the sensory exploration of its surroundings that is innate, first and foremost. Past this most vulnerable early physical stage, as newborns adjust to life on the outside they rely on the smell of us, the comforting closeness of us and our care of their needs. As they become increasingly reassured with being able to rely on us to provide their basic needs and their biological maturity progresses, babies will begin

to explore the things and the immediate world around them. We all know babies will put everything in their mouths, and as their bodies strengthen physically, they will reach for everything they can see and seek to explore all they are curious about with those senses they were born with. As babies grow bigger, they rely on their maturing senses to gather new information about the environment they are in, with each of the senses being equally important. Why does the eighteen-month-old child, who has learnt that pulling the hair of another person can get a strong vocal response, always let go when you cover their eyes and make no noise? By restricting the sensory messages a child receives, regaining these senses becomes more important than feeling the hair or seeking to evoke your expression of the painful effect of their action. To a child of this age, its senses are everything. But what influences the response the child makes to the sensory information it receives? This is when imitation becomes so important.