Firstly the children are interacting with each other. They are negotiating, sharing ideas, responding to each other, expanding on other's ideas, agreeing, disagreeing, reasoning. In other words, not only developing important social skills but also language skills.
Secondly they are `being creative, such as coming up with innovative and different ways to play with equipment and designing and constructing like with the blocks and sand.
A focus for us now is to try and build on these positive attributes of play and help foster conditions for children to be really developing their thinking skills along with social skills. We are trying to give the children a greater variety of experiences to explore, and looking at ways of focussing their play in particular directions by setting challenges.
We also need to be looking at ways to record their exploring and thinking, in order to revisit their experiences, to help develop their language and thinking more.
