ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the names and definitions of the 14 categories of play evaluated with the DPA-P. These categories are defined in terms of what children do with the toys, once a child has accessed them (e.g., taken them into their hands). They represent qualitatively different levels of children’s understanding about objects, people, and events. Activities such as putting a puzzle back together or moving beads from one container to another are qualitatively different from loading a dump truck with pretend garbage and taking it to the “dump.” Such different levels of knowledge, experience, and mental representation are subsumed in these different categories. An evaluation of children’s understanding of these categories allows us to make determinations of what the child knows and what the child is ready to learn.
The categories are presented beginning with those that emerge earliest in development and continue with those that appear as children develop. Each category is first defined and then examples of that category are provided. Each category also includes a two-letter code that is used for the DPA-P coding sheets, described in a later chapter.
