ABSTRACT
As psychologists and teachers have become more interested in assessment for remediation, and less in assessment for its own sake, people working with handicapped children have also begun to explore more flexible methods of mapping a child's difficulties and potentialities than formal tests provide. In a sense, when parents assess a child on formal tests they confine him within the tramlines of parents own preconceptions about the nature of the abilities that he might show. Parents noted that to a certain extent there was a core or relatively finite repertoire of play activities associated with any particular toy, which tended to unfold in a developmental sequence. As many of the situations and developmental continua were commonly seen in spontaneous play with the same toy by different children, and as the variations observed provided valuable insights, it seemed a useful exercise to record these as an aid to further observation.
