ABSTRACT
This chapter looks more closely at the complexity and connection involved in children's play. It also helps children to understand and make sense of what they have learned from ideas, feelings and relationships. Play is the natural way for young children to learn and it is a vital part of the process. These kinds of play games with rules, competence, wallowing, metacognition and representations of how children make sense of those experiences the authors explore here. Piaget notes that it is through the process of active learning, discovery and solving problems in play that infants and young children develop the thinking skills to organise and analyse knowledge. Children develop competence through time to play with toys and materials. Wallowing allows children to grapple with their important relationships in a way that makes sense to them, through activities that they like and have chosen themselves. During the earlier sequences of this type of play, children are getting to know the blocks.
