Introduction

Our aim with this book is to embrace emerging possibilities in children’s play. Since writing the first edition, the authors have developed the possibilities theme in two further books, The Characteristics of Effective Learning: Creating and capturing the possibilities in the early years (2015) and Examining Levels of Involvement in the Early Years: Engaging with children’s possibilities (2016). There are connections within the three books that have given us and the publisher the confidence to re-present our ideas which students and practitioners have reported as being useful and illuminative. Our subsequent research and reading have enabled us to enhance many of the chapters with further encounters and insights, while maintaining the essence of our established ideology and practice with students and practitioners who work in a very wide range of early years settings. There does seem to be a timelessness about this, in contrast to constantly changing guidance, policy, rhetoric and regulations and we ask readers to continue to be encouraged, provoked and challenged to re-think, re-search, re-visit, re-create and reflect. This book is free from any curriculum constraint, with learning at the heart of any teaching we consider. Readers can surmise, therefore, that planning and all that we understand of the organized preparation for future learning and teaching, should be guided by children’s interests, and all those play and possibilities we have observed and delighted in. In Giugni’s words, it remains timely to grant ourselves permission to question ‘the way we have always done things’ (cited in MacNaughton, 2005: 116), in the same way that very young children persist in asking ‘why’.