ABSTRACT
If we look at the normal five-year-old child he has clearly learnt an immense amount before he arrives at school. He can walk and talk, do simple drawings, play games, help dress himself and a host of other more detailed activities. How has he learnt to do all these things in such a relatively short space of time and, in most cases, without much formal instruction? Considering the large amount of time the pre-school child spends playing and rehearsing activities the answer seems, intuitively, that he must learn a lot of it through play. There is still considerable debate on how to define play and what its precise role is, but at a practical level it is certainly true that play is vital for a child’s development and, to quote from John and Elizabeth Newson’s well-known book Play and Playthings, ‘play is perhaps the most serious and significant of all human activities’.
