In Hungary the application of the Montessori educational method was banned by the political authorities between the Second World War and the beginning of the 1990s. After the foundation of the Montessori Association of Hungary in 1991 – besides using Montessori material – the enrichment of play has also been encouraged in accordance with our heritage and accepting the explanations of the writer of this study.
What is play ? Play is an activity whose features are spontaneity, self-motivation and enjoyment.
Little animals practise these behaviour patterns in their play instinctively which are necessary for their existence and race preservation e.g. clinging, releasing an object, escaping, chasing as well as catching and letting go of a moving thing. Play among animals is preparing for life.
When observing and analyzing children’s different play types, we can come to the finding that children’s play is also necessary for the healthy development of the personality.
About functional play types
These are young children’s first activities. They can be noticed in the first months of their lives.
Playing with their voices: They repeat sounds and sound groups from which the develop their first baby talk, then the first meaningful words and finally – after long practice – real talk.
Playing with their hand: They lie on their backs holding their hands in front of themselves, moving the hands and the fingers and they are very astonished to see the movements.
When a small thing is put into their hands, they catch it, shake it, drop it and look for it.
The first exercises of fine hand movements are the coordination of hands and eyes.
Playing with their body, muscles and movements:They rock on their backs, turn onto their stomaches and back again, then crawl and climb – if they have enough space – they get on their knees, stand up, plop down, then later they jump and hop. All this play for them. By this they make basis of their safe movement in the future and develop awareness of space.
These playful exercises or functional play seemingly cause a lot of joy for children. That is why they do it and meanwhile they develop themselves – as Montessori wrote in many of her studies.These play types can be seen even in the kindergartens, although more and more rarely as the children grow, and often as a partial movement of more complicated play.
Sometimes children of kindergarten age like to talk baby talk, too. Playing with sound groups helps the development of speaking skill and is very amousing for children.
There is no better proof of the existence of this than children’s rhymes, ditties with meaningless words and meaningless refrains of children’s verses.
Little children in kindergarten still like jumping, hopping and running here and there – seemingly without any purpose - climbing, hiding, jumping down and so on. They let off their extra energy while moving, becoming more and more skilful, stronger and last but not least they calm down.
The common feature of all the functional play types is that their purpose is to practise a function. Children practise it spontaneously and from self-motivation seemingly find pleasure in it and its unquestionable result is the development of the child’s different activities.Meanwhile they get to know themselves and the world surrounding them. They learn very important things and this learning gets realized in the process of play.
Construction play
The children of kindergarten age can create – first simple, later more complicated – very attractive constructs from different building materials like wood, metal or maybe plastic. First they enjoy how the building elements can stand on each other or next to each other, and later they create constructs for certain purpose like residental buildings, castles, space stations, zoos, garages, airports, observation towers etc. The activity is often more important then its result.
They can create clever constructs from Lego and other similar elements, like cars, vehicles, planes, ships, cranes, bridges etc.
They enjoy the activity and they are pleased with the constructs so they often go on playing with them.These activities are called construction play. Satisfying outer needs and demands or learning things are not children’s aims. They want to play just from self-motivation. During play, however, they learn a lot and improve their different abilities. They get acquainted with shapes and learn how to assemble the elements. Their play is characterized first by blind attempts and later by knowledge. They look for the thing they need. Meanwhile they think about what fits there and what else is necessary for the successful creation of the construct. While assembling , their hands show skill whereas when choosing the piece, they use a problem-solving way of thinking. If they know in advance what they want to construct, observation has an important role. They often deliberately form a construct differnetly from how it can be seen in real life. Then, fantasy gets a special role.
About didactic play types
The aim of these play types is that through them children get definite knowledge or they improve certain abilities. From the point of view of play-psychology, Montessori materials belong to this group since all of these are skill-developing materials. They include memory games, puzzles, dominoes, lotteries and educational card games that classify things or make children recognize differences. The modern toy industry brings more and more didactic toys to the toy market. The play psychology and play pedagogy classify Montessori materials as didactic because they have all the criteria of play.
About games
The point of these games is playing by the rules. For example, you have to throw a dice and move with a marker in accordance with the rules. The player whose marker gets to goal first is the winner. Some of these are ’Lóverseny’ (’Horse Racing’), ’Ne nevess korán’ (’Don’t Laugh Too Early’). Games of different types are card-playing and competitive games like tag or hide-and-seek, which are mostly played outdoors.
The pedagogic value of these games is that the children learn to play by the rules and they also learn to win and lose. This is not against the Montessori principle that says the competitive spirit shouldn’t emerge among children in learning because of children’s different faculties and different pace of development. They complete in games.
We are cominced that we cannot completely eliminate situations from a child’s life. The teacher can influence the forming of play groups in a way that children of similar development should play together so that they can have the same chance to win.
Those singing children’s games adapted from folk culture also belong to games.
Besides playing by the rules , their special value is music ednucation that is encouraging children to like rhythm, singing and moving the music.
About roleplays
One of the most favourite play types of kindergarten children is roleplay. They play certain roles imagining certain situations. The most frequent one is playing house,”mum-and-dad”. Playing the role of a doctor is also very frequent, but in their play there are also other roles and situations e.g. playing a detective, ambulance, fire brigade, space ship etc. Children’s roleplays mostly reflect what they have experienced in real life, or what they would like to experience, and sometimes what they have seen on TV or heard in tales.
Identifying themselves with the roles in play is a good preparation for the roles waiting for them in life. On the other hand, experiencing the roles often helps to act out emotions and ease mental tension. For example when a sibling arrives in the family, the kindergarten child often wants to be the the baby himself, thus experiencing his jealousy. In other situations the sibling is a doll, and the kindergartner as the mother or older brother/sister gives the baby a good spanking. We can often observe that the kindergarten child plays the role of a good mother and he does everything the way he can see it from his mother or the way he would like to see it. The child’s play often reflects the life of the family, the relations in the it and sentences said between family members can be heard during play.
It often happens that in roleplays children’s emotions and desires are expressed. For this reason, it is very important in respect of emotional and social education. It is often expressed while the roles are being devided. Every child tries to get a role suited to their wishes.Repeating pleasant situations they enjoy the happy moments again. Acting out their jealousy, desires, fears,anger and irritation they reduce them or make them more bearable. And meanwhile they are acting out their negative emotions in a socialised way. At the same time, in roleplays they practise how to adjust to each other, how to be attentive to each other – how to reconcile their desires and wishes.
On the other hand, roleplays show both the parent and the teacher a lot about the children’s social situations, their place in the family, their personalities and emotional states. All these can be very helpful for the teacher’s educational work.
How can play be introduced in our Montessori group ?
Criteria for playthings are the same as those of the Montessori materials.The playthings should be nice, attractive, motivating and they should fit the function in the play and the requirements of aesthetic education.
They should have a permanent place in accordance with the play situation.The rule of putting things away is vallid for this the same way as for the Montessori materials.
Suggestions
For play with physical exercises the most important is to ensure enough space. We should purchese motor developing gymnasting apparatus and playthings and place them so that there is enough space around them. In the kindergarten yard there should be playthings and gymnastic apparatus of this kind, which will motivate children to move. By this we can make them let off their extra energy and while they move they can become more skilful and learn to overcome their possible fears and help each other if necessary.
For construction play types, we should get building toys like Lego and other construction plaything; transport toys like cars, planes, etc. A building corner should be formed where these playthings are placed on shelves. There should be a large carpet on the floor for transport play and constructing and there should be a table on which children can play with smaller toys or constructs.
Didactic playthings – they should be placed on open shelves in the group room – as we learnt from the Montessori pedagogy.
For roleplays – In a corner or nook of the room, we should furnish a nice doll-room, doll-kitchen with small furniture, small bed, cupboard, shelf for doll clothes, small table and chairs, kitchen equipment, small dishes and dining set etc. and certainly with several nice dolls, maybe soft toy animals. These latter ones are especially loved by small kindergarten children.
About the order of the day
The teacher’s behaviour while children are playing
Usually teachers should follow the same Montessori principles during play when children play with Montessori materials. They should monitor each and every child’s play and they should help only when a child asks for it or when the teacher finds that the child needs it.
The teacher's specific task in the different play types
In functional play
Children playing with sounds or babbling can be pleased if we respond to them with baby talk, the humour of which is also appreciated by children. In this period it is timely to keep telling rhymes, ditties, nonsense rhymes and children’s verses. By this we can encourage them to continue their play , which helps to develop their speaking skills. For children that require a lot of movement we suggest doing physical exercises e.g. they should round a chair or creep under a table as much as they can or they should play on a gymnastic equipment. The teacher’s task is to satisfy their motion needs so she/he shold develop the children’s physical ability by making the exercises more and more difficult while preventing the risk of accidents and avoiding disturbance of others.
During games
The teacher’s task is to introduce the game in clear sentences so that every child understands it. First it is advisable to have a test game with the children. They have to observe that children should play by the rules and help them solve conflicts, but shouldn’t solve the problems for them.
The teacher must watch carefully – and if it is necessary they have to intervene – that children should have the right attitude toward winning and losing.
During roleplays
The teacher’s important role is to enrich play so that they can exploit as much of its pedagogic values as possible. At the same time they should make children as happy as they can. For this teachers need great psychological and pedagogical knowledge as well as deep empathy.
Thorough freedom – in the sense of Montessori – must be ensured. Children can decide themselves what to play and how to play. We shouldn’t join the children’s roleplay unless they invite us or we find it necessary for some reason.
We should be very careful how we give help and how much help we give. By no means can we take over the control of the play from the children. And we should also avoid solving problems instead of them. We shouldn’t draw children’s attention to the fact that in real life things are different from how they act it out in their play. They might do it that way because they want to make it different from real life. If we notice that something is missing from their play, something that could make it more complete, we can provide help. We should take care not to limit children’s independence or disturb the process of play. We should assert Montessori’s pedagogical principles.
A few examples from our kindergatens
- The children want to play "wedding" and they can't find suitable clothing for the bride. The teacher brings an old veil and asks softly wether it is a suitable one and also she draws their attention to the treasure box to rummage in it. (Every group has a box of this kind in which they collect all kinds of stuff.)
- Three little girls are cooking in the doll-kitchen. Andy appears in the door, because he would like to play with the girls. The girls don't want him to join them. Andy turns to the teacher for help. Teacher Mariann accompanies him to the kitchen and suggest the girls play with him since he is such a nice boy. The little girls first think, then one of them cries out ' OK, he should be the father, then '. In return Andy happily starts doing the washing up.
What if the teacher finds out that one of her children will soon have a new sibling. For example a few weeks before Susie's baby-sister/brother was born, the teacher encouraged her to play with a baby-doll, change her nappy, breastfeed her and push her in a pram etc. so that Susie could work out anticipated distress and jealousy.
If one of the children would like to join a playgroup and the others don't want him/her to join, the teacher can help to solve the problem with a clever motivational comment or act that fits the play.
*************************************************
Teachers dealing with children should always act in accordance with Montessori principles.
