This document discusses why children play and what constitutes play. It argues that play is how children make sense of and explore the world. Through play, children develop important qualities like creativity, observation, problem-solving, and social skills. Play allows children to experiment with their bodies, materials, experiences and environments in open-ended ways. True play is internally motivated and freely chosen by children. The document warns against overly structured adult-led activities displacing child-led play.

1. toy as verb

3. Why children play

4. topics
• Why play • What is toy
• What is play • Why do they make
• What they play • How do they make
• How do they play
• What do they play
+Value + Beauty +knowledge

5. word of Caution
Play and Toy are categories of adult mind.
We have divided everything in to various
categories- work, play, learn.
Art, science, language
etc etc etc

6. warning
Reasoning short circuits comprehension.
So hold your firmly held opinion at bay and be
open to reading with out judgments.
Allow understanding to take place rather than
forcing it.

7. What is a toy?

9. Exploring beauty?
Arrangement
Order
Colour
Do not conclude, let insights happen

10. Every object the child encounters are toys

11. Nature as 'toy'

14. Children responded with theses video cameras just they
day after we started documentation. What they imitated
was the digital video camera rather than the usual still
cameras which most of us were using to document. Just
one video camera captured their attention.

15. It looks like
Children explore the way
things look
(form)

16. Body as 'toy'

17. There is no word for 'toy' in
indigenous communities.
Children in the process of making
sense of the world explores what ever
it comes across. In this sense even
the body is turned in to a toy.

18. Exploring the materials -
properties, possibilities

20. Children explore the external form,
the internal structure (quality or
what is possible) and the process

21. Child observes what the world is
about, the way it looks, the way it
sounds, feels, tastes….
The way things are connected, related.
Child wants to understand how the
world functions
what possibilities exists
the real world in which the adults
inhabits

23. H
O
U
S
e

28. innovation

29. Children as sociologists- to learn to live in society
Children as lawers. Exploring the inherent value system
in the child
Children as artist. How children are exploring order
Children as scientist. How children explore the world.
Children as designers
Children as architects
Children and theatre - how children enact what they
experience
What children draw naturally. Connection between
their context, experience and drawing.

30. Play is a biologically rooted process to help
children to make sense of the place they live in
and to develop qualities to live. children
develop their physical, intellectual, emotional,
social, and moral capacities through play. They
practice physical and manual skills, intellectual
skills, and social skills.

31. Fear, resilience, endurance
In such play, children dose themselves with just the
level of fear that they can tolerate, a level just below
the threshold of what might cause them to freeze
up. In this way, they learn how to manage fear, how to
prevent it from incapacitating them. They learn that
fear is normal and healthy, something they can control
and overcome through their own efforts.

32. What is not play?
When a child feels coerced, the play spirit
vanishes and all of the advantages of that spirit
go with it.
Math games in school and adult-led sports are
not play for those who feel that they have to
participate and are not ready to accept, as their
own, the rules that the adults have established.
(peter Gray)

33. sensitivity
It is through social play that children learn, on
their own, with no lectures, how to meet their
own needs while, at the same time, satisfying
the needs of others. This is perhaps the most
important lesson that people in any society can
learn.

34. adults who have a great deal of freedom as to
how and when to do their work often
experience that work as play, even (in fact,
especially) when the work is difficult. In
contrast, people who must do just what others
tell them to do at work rarely experience their
work as play.

35. What is play?

36. types of play
There are two types
1.Internally motivated play
2. Externally motivated play
Internally motivated play is for the development
and growth of the physical body, the cognitive
apparatus and …….(the internal development)
Externally motivated play is to make sense of
the world but this also helps in internal
development

37. Internally motivated play
Some play emanate from bodies need to
develop and this do not need play mate.
Children would spontaneously swirl around,
children would close their eyes and walk etc
These are not externally motivated plays.
This happens more in younger age. In this sense
most actions of the new born till they are
around 3 is largly internally motivated.

38. Play can only happen when there is total freedom.
Autonomy of each participant is respected.
play always involves rules of some sort, but all players
must freely accept the rules, and if rules are changed
then all players must agree to the changes. That is
why play is the most democratic of all activities. In
social play (play involving more than one player), one
player may emerge for a period as the leader, but only
at the will of all the others. Every rule a leader
proposes must be approved, at least tacitly, by all of
the other players.
The freedom to quit provides the foundation for all of
the democratic processes that occur in social play.

39. What children play

40. What ever phenomenon the child encounters is
made in to a play.
Every phenomenon has components, process
and relationship.
All this becomes aspects for children to explore
and play

41. What ever the child experiences are recreated, re
enacted and this becomes their play

42. Stages of play

43. Children play
to enable phisical growth
to awaken intellegence
to awaken senses
to learn to manipulate things
to develop qualities for living-
observation, patience, attention,
curiosity, creativity,

44. No gender division
We are born with the qualities of male and female principle
and children till about 7 years have very integrated body.
In cultures where there is patriarchy as the gender division is
cultivated the bodies begin to look distinct.
But people in oral, sense literate cultures tend to have similar
bodies as they retain both the qualities.
The internal quality gets exhibited in external form.

46. Children imitates, invents, pretends, repeats
what ever they see around.
Constantly revisiting the happenings around
them. Each time innovating and discovering new
things

47. Cooking/ kitchen

50. The world outside is an integrated, holistic
system and not fragmented and linear.
The childs attempt is to know the whole and its
inter relationship and the patterns with in.
The child lives a here and now situation
establishing a sot of completeness at every
moment.
Their way of knowing is by being. They live the
laws of science and imbibe it just the way they
learn to speak gramatically correct language.

51. Toy is an idea totally misunderstood
by the modern adult.
Children, in the process of making
sense of the terrain in which they
find themselves, observe, touch,
smell, twist, break, taste, make.
Their actions are spontaneous but at
the same time planing and
abstracting is inherent.

52. • recilience • Sensitivity
• Creativity • Care
• imagination • Attention
• Self relience • Patience
• Observation • Responsibility
• Exploration • Self discipline
• Manipulation • Risk taking
• Planning • Fearlessness
• Co operation • Autonomy
• Abstraction • Body intelligence
• Codification • endurance

53. work as play

54. Why Children play
May be
To awaken their abilities to make sense of the world
To awaken the qualities to be in the world
To awaken the sensibilities to live in harmony

55. Children are usually very busy doing something or the
other
They don’t like to sit still
If they are alone either they are exploring whatever
they can put their hand on
Any objects becomes the toy to play with
What ever the child experiences is recreated, re
enacted and this becomes their play
Some times the object of their experience is recreated
Some times the objects are recreated as propes to
their play

56. After a bus ride or several bus rides
Bus or vehicle as an object is explored, this exploration
itself is play
Some times they are exploring only the formal aspect
Some times they are exploring the process or mechanisms
Some times the experience of riding in the bus is reenaced
This could be both dynamic as well as static
They could just use a chair, bench or any such object and
enact the sound of the bus or
Children just use their own body as bus/ car/ bike etc and
run around, go from city to city, stop for passengers to get
in and get out.
The bus is often very specific. They will tell you which bus
they are riding.

57. Observe a child sitting on a soft sofa.
Sitting?
No they don’t sit, they keep jumping on it as if
the to experience the softness and the spring
like quality.
But if the surface is hard they don’t jump.
Children are constantly responding aptly to
what ever situations they find themselves in.
A round pillar would make them run around but
a square may not

58. The way the world is
The form, the process and the connection or the
relation
Children are exploring what the world is about/
how does it look, how does it feel, how does it
function

59. Cultural diversity will be a thing of the past
soon.
Modernity with its mass schooling, adult
controlled play and mass manufactured toys
would homogenize and control people .