This paper examines the effects of the playworld educational practice on the development of narrative competence in 5- to 7-year-old children. The playworld educational practice is derived from play pedagogy and the theory of narrative learning, both developed and implemented in Scandinavia. The playworld practice consists of joint adult–child pretense based in a work of children's literature, discussion, free play, and visual art production. When compared to children under a control intervention (conventional school practices without pretend play), children who participated in the playworld practice show significant improvements in narrative length, coherence, and comprehension, although not in linguistic complexity. These findings provide further evidence concerning the role of pretense in the narrative development of young children.

BACKGROUND/AIM: There is a need for culturally appropriate assessments for Australian Indigenous children. This article reports the selection of culturally appropriate and gender-neutral play materials, and changes in administration identified to develop further the Indigenous Child-Initiated Pretend Play Assessment (I-ChIPPA).
METHOD: Twenty-three typically developing children aged four to six years from the Pilbara region in Western Australia participated in the study. Children were presented with four sets of play materials and frequency counts were recorded for each time the child used one of the play materials in a pretend play action. Twelve of the 23 children came to play in pairs.
RESULTS: Both boys and girls used the Pilbara toy set including the dark coloured dolls and Pilbara region animals, more frequently than the standardised play materials from the Child-Initiated Pretend Play Assessment (ChIPPA).
CONCLUSION: This study reports the first steps in the development of the I-ChIPPA. Future development will include the refinement of the administration and scoring with pairs of children, and then validity testing the assessment.

Cultures of Creativity, nurturing creative mindsets from LEGO Foundation on Vimeo.

Creativity is one of the most important competencies of the 21st Century. Yet, the puzzling question is how to nurture it? Children are creative from the day they are born and the film describes how to support creativity across cultures. The content is based on the report, Cultures of Creativity, published by the LEGO Foundation, 2013. Authors: David Gauntlett and Bo Stjerne Thomsen and 20 leading international experts on play, learning and creativity. Read more on LEGOFoundation.com

Across cultures and eras, children have engaged in play as part of the process of growing and maturing into adulthood. Play has been recognized as an effective form of pedagogy to promote learning in the early years. However, beliefs about what play is and how it should be practiced vary across Hong Kong and in other countries. Because Chinese culture places a heavy emphasis on academic achievement, a play-based curriculum has not been widely implemented in the region. Through classroom observations and interviews with key stakeholders in early childhood education, namely parents, teachers, and principals, this study reveals the complexity of views on this matter and uncovers the root cause of the difficulties in supporting play in the Hong Kong kindergartens. These findings may help promote the play-based curriculum in Hong Kong and other countries where play is in crisis. (Contains 1 table.)

Cultures develop when people find ways to play, make, and share. This report describes how human cultures can be characterised by their similarities rather than their differences, and emphasises the importance of recognising playfulness and creativity to develop societies prepared to accommodate the rapid changes associated with technology and globalisation.

This study examines the evolutionary function of children’s pretence. The everyday, cultural environment that children engage with is of a highly complex structure. Human adaptation, thus, becomes, by analogy, an equally complex process that requires the development of life skills. Whilst in role play children engage in ‘mimesis’ and recreate the ecology of their world in order to gradually appropriate its structures. Role play enables them to create their group cultures, through which they communally explore and assign meaning to their worlds and themselves in it. The research took place in a Greek state school and employed participant and non-participant observation of the children’s role play sessions. The findings, grouped under four thematic categories, may reflect the players’ adaptation and evolutionary processes but also the expression of their deeply rooted, existential concerns at that particular stage of their development.