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Sociodramatic play is where children act out imaginary situations and stories, become different characters, and pretend they are in different locations and times.

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"Cooperative play is the last of the six stages of play described by sociologist Mildred Parten. Cooperative play involves children playing and working with others towards a common goal or purpose".

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"Encouraging your child to participate in cooperative play is important for fostering their long term social development. During cooperative play they can learn and develop a number of life skills that will help them get along with others and move through the world successfully"

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"Encouraging your child to participate in cooperative play is important for fostering their long term social development. During cooperative play they can learn and develop a number of life skills that will help them get along with others and move through the world successfully"

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Onlooker:

appreciates ongoing drama

nods, smiles, and so forth.

Store manager:

gathers materials

makes props

constructs costumes

organises set

makes script suggestions.

Co-player:

assumes role

mediates dialogue

guide split

defines roles and responsibilities of characters.

Play leader:

introduces conflict

facilitates dialogues

solves problems

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Support Children with Special Needs for Parents, Guardians and Educators!

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Support Children with Special Needs for Parents, Guardians and Educators!

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Children generally learn and develop a lot through play, and those with special needs are no different. In addition, play can support the specific difficulties your child might have.

For example, if your child has a hearing or visual impairment, play can help strengthen their other senses to help them navigate and explore the world. If they have a mobility impairment, play can exercise their muscles and improve coordination.

Children with autistic spectrum disorder may be less social or imaginative with their play. They may instead show interest in non-toy objects, and get enjoyment from things like counting or sorting objects - this is still playing! You can use their interests to encourage social and imaginative play, by joining in with the activities they enjoy.

A child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may also struggle to play socially, because their symptoms, such as having difficulty waiting their turn, can sometimes put other children off playing with them. Play can give children with ADHD the chance to express themselves and exert some energy, and with some adult guidance can help them build relationships with other children too.

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Supporting Children with Special Needs through Play - The Good Play Guide

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Children generally learn and develop a lot through play, and those with special needs are no different. In addition, play can support the specific difficulties your child might have. For example, if your child has a hearing or visual impairment, play can help strengthen their other senses to help them navigate and explore the world.

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This is a great article talking about the benefits of Risky Play. What I really liked about this article was how updated it is and how it is with the current times.

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Lacking the usual scheduled activities and adult supervision, children are finding the space to play freely.

Tessa Feuerstein, 11, and her brother, Eli Feuerstein, 9, riding on the bike ramp they made from logs and boards in Ellicottville, N.Y. This summer, some children have been engaging in riskier outdoor play. Credit... Libby March for The New York Times

As the coronavirus pandemic lingers like a hangover, many parents are still struggling to work from home and take care of their children at the same time. And for some kids, that brings a special kind of freedom: the ability to play like nobody's watching.

Much of the time, nobody is.

So they're doing things that would make most parents cringe: Children are racing on stilts in a cul-de-sac in Omaha, Neb.; a 6-year-old is climbing trees and scooping up caterpillars in the woods in Franklin, Tenn.; and siblings are building their own playground in a dirt parking lot in upstate New York.

In the Chan household, where Emily Chan is working from home full time, the kids - ages 5, 8 and 10 - bake cupcakes unsupervised. They leap from the furniture in the living room and hang from a trapeze bar, part of an "indoor playground" that was pressure-mounted in a doorway.

Outside, the family ride their bikes together in the street.

It's all OK "as long as you're not burning down the apartment or trying to kill the dog," she said.

But along with greater independence comes more potential for injuries. Doctors have reported a rise in broken bones and lacerations among children who are getting hurt while playing with outdoor toys and sports equipment at home during the pandemic. Chan's 5-year-old, for example, dropped a glass and cut her hand while helping her siblings cook.

In Franklin, Tenn., Stella Rose, 6, fell while speeding down a hill on her scooter.

"I could hear 'Maaamaaaaa!' faintly in the distance. And my blood went cold and I ran out of the house," said her mother, Jackie Gutierrez-Jones, a writer and self-described former "helicopter-style" mom who used to have eyes on her daughter constantly. "She was splayed out in the road, all bloody."

On a different day, Stella Rose fell out of a tree. (After both of those falls she was scraped up but otherwise fine, her mother said.)

Brooke Phillips, a high school theater teacher who lives in Omaha, said her 4-year-old daughter now wanders the neighborhood by herself, visiting other people's backyards.

"Before, I would have absolutely freaked out," she said. But now that there are multiple kids and parents stuck at home, she said, she isn't as worried. "It's different, but awesome."

Her 8-year-old daughter started doing daring tricks on her bike. "She has come in battered and bruised every other day from trying something like that," Phillips said. "It's a super good thing for her that she's been able to learn that it's OK to get hurt and to keep going."

And the children, none of whom have ended up in the emergency room, seem to have a greater appreciation of being outside, their parents said.

"The woods are like an enriched classroom - a Gymboree on steroids," said Lenore Skenazy, a longtime proponent of risky play and the president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience. In May, Let Grow surveyed 800 U.S. parents and 800 children, ages 8 to 13, to find out what the kids were doing during the pandemic. More than two-thirds of the children said their parents were letting them try more things on their own, and a similar percentage said they were finding new things to pass the time.

"Kids are doing a lot of things they hadn't done before and the parents are gaining a better understanding of their kids' potential," she said. "In some sense, the whole purpose of childhood is to become increasingly independent."

In Norway, despite the fact that parents aren't usually as focused on safety as they are in the United States, there has been a steep decline in the amount of outdoor unsupervised play over the last couple of decades, said Dr. Beate. But during the pandemic "we suddenly see a lot of children outside roaming around playing in the parks."

Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist and researcher at Boston College who has studied how children educate themselves through play and exploration, argues that opportunities for children to play outside with other children have decreased over the last 60 years, leading to rising rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents.

According to Gray, the decline started at the end of the 1950s, deepened in the 1980s, when missing children began appearing on milk cartons and public service announcements asked if parents knew where their child was.

Well-publicized abductions, like those of Adam Walsh, Etan Patz, Jacob Wetterling and Elizabeth Smart, only solidified fears of "stranger danger." That and the rise of adult-directed, after-school activities have led most parents to believe that adult supervision is better for their children than going out and playing, Dr. Gray said.

"I sometimes say that we've turned childhood into a period of résumé building," he added.

A 2004 study compared American mothers' active, outdoor play experiences during their childhood with that of their own children ages 3 to 12. The researcher found a decrease in the time spent outdoors and in unstructured play, as well as an increase in adult-structured activities.

When parents restrict unsupervised outdoor play, it's often done with the best of intentions. Of the 830 respondents in the 2004 survey, 82 percent cited safety concerns, such as abduction and traffic.

But Dr. Beate said her research suggests that risky play has an important function: It helps children explore and conquer fears, develop confidence and reduce anxiety.

Healthy children who aren't struggling with developmental challenges are usually "quite aware of the risks they are taking," Dr. Beate said. "The worst thing parents can do is to yell at them, 'Come down, you're not allowed to be up there! Be careful!' Because then you're actually disturbing them in their concentration of what they're doing."

Most children will stop when the fear becomes overwhelming, she added. And at that point they might ask for help.

While a certain degree of freedom is important, parents should still try to remain vigilant of potential hidden hazards, Dr. Beate said, like a rotting log that could cave in, or a broken piece of playground equipment. In those cases, parents should of course intervene before their children accidentally hurt themselves.

The benefits of riskier play have inspired cities to create "adventure" playgrounds, like the 50,000-square-foot park on Governors Island in New York. It has no slides or swings but plenty of dismembered store mannequins, tires and mattresses, and adults are not allowed. Educators in Britain have also sought to make playgrounds a lot more risky by adding hammers, saws and mud pits. Similar types of playgrounds have popped up in Australia, Canada, Taiwan and India.

Not all parents are convinced of the need for more unsupervised, adventurous play - but the pandemic and the resulting quarantine has persuaded some of them.

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Risky Play Encourages Resilience (Published 2020)

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Lacking the usual scheduled activities and adult supervision, children are finding the space to play freely. As the coronavirus pandemic lingers like a hangover, many parents are still struggling to work from home and take care of their children at the same time.

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If you are participating as a co-player or play leader: model and prompt children during play to develop their skills in joining in, sharing, and taking turns.

Allow children to use sociodramatic play to practise using language as different roles/characters.

Help to model and prompt for negotiating and problem-solving skills during play.

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Math Games/Activities for Parents, Guardians and Educators!

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Math Games/Activities for Parents, Guardians and Educators!

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Cooperation
Communication
Empathy
Trust
Conflict Resolution

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"Cooperative play allows children to work together towards a common goal instead of in opposition to one another or in pursuit of winning. Parents and caregivers can foster cooperative play by creating an environment with tools and games kids can use to work cooperatively"

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For Parents, Guardians, and Educators-Outdoor Play

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For Parents, Guardians, and Educators-Outdoor Play

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This was a great source to read on if you have struggles with letting your child play outside and take risks.

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When you think back to your favourite childhood play experiences, chances are they took place outdoors, unsupervised and while hanging out with friends. But today's kids spend far less time playing than their parents did.

Mariana Brussoni, a professor at the University of British Columbia and BC Children's Hospital - featured in The Nature of Things documentary - has spent years researching the benefits of play that have an element of risk. Risky play for children, she explains, is "thrilling and exciting play where children engage in risk without certainty," and it has been proven to have immense benefits.

The benefits of risky play

Risky play involves kids experimenting and pushing themselves to figure out what will happen, without knowing the exact outcome. If kids don't go far enough with their play, it's boring and if they go too far, it gets too scary, Brussoni explains. She likens it to a science experiment, where kids are testing out their environment and determining what they're comfortable with.

"When we have kids engage in play, it's really a fundamental way for them to figure out the world - how the world works, how their body works," says Brussoni, adding that these little experiments are all done "in context of a relatively safe space."

Risky play in early childhood can help develop a child's self-confidence, resilience, executive functioning abilities and even risk-management skills. And Brussoni's work in injury prevention research shows that engaging in risky play can actually reduce the risk of injury, too.

Brussoni gives the following tips for parents on how to put riskier play into action.

Focus on 'as safe as necessary' over 'as safe as possible'

Consider a playground. Things such as needles on the ground or broken equipment would be cause for parental intervention, whereas navigating a bush with thorns at eye-level, for example, would be something you could involve the child in.

Rather than removing the plant altogether, Brussoni advises assessing the situation together, having the child take stock of the thorns and then suggest ways to stay safe. Balance the risk with the benefits, she says.

Provide guidance

Brussoni suggests that when you walk your child to school every day, it can be helpful to take the time to point out the potential dangers so that they gradually reach a point where they have enough knowledge to stay safe. This builds confidence and prepares them for solo adventures.

MORE:
From bonobos to sheep, lots of animals enjoy play as much as we do
Unstructured play can create mentally healthier kids

Don't let your own fears get in the way

Parents' fears can get in the way of giving their children freedom. Worries about kidnapping and injury, and the fear of people thinking they're bad caregivers can drive many parents to intervene before their child can engage in risk during play.

But statistics show that the likelihood of a child in Canada getting kidnapped is 1 in 14 million - similar odds to winning the lottery. And recent estimates show that children would need to spend about three hours per day playing, every day, for 10 years before they were likely to get an injury that needed treatment (and it would likely still be minor).

Brussoni and her team of researchers have developed an online tool called Outsideplay.ca, which informs parents on making informed choices regarding risky play for their children.

Practice the 17-second rule

Instead of telling your child not to climb so high or run so fast while observing them at play, take a moment - or, as Brussoni advises, 17 seconds. Step back, she says, and "see how your child is reacting to the situation so that you can actually get a better sense of what they're capable of when you're not getting in the way."

Brussoni explains that this will provide them with "the opportunity to figure out for themselves what's comfortable and what they can do," while allowing them to develop those all-important risk-management skills.

Get out of the way

In , Brussoni states that the most important thing parents and guardians can do is get out of the way: provide children with an environment for play and then let them play.

This doesn't necessarily mean that optimal risky play is unsupervised. For younger kids, it may simply be about facilitating and supporting children in how they want to play, rather than guiding it .

6 key factors to risky play:

1. Play with heights, such as climbing trees or structures

2. Play at high speeds, such as a fast game of tag or riding a bike really fast

3. Play with tools, such as building a fort or whittling a stick

4. Play near elements, such as playing near fire, water, a cliff or something that a child could fall into

5. Play with a chance of getting lost, such as wandering the neighbourhood with friends unsupervised, or simply hiding in the bushes for younger kids.

6. Rough-and-tumble play, such as play fighting "

Provide time, freedom and space for good play

Brussoni emphasizes that parents need to carve out enough time to let children play, despite a high volume of homework and extracurriculars. Kids need to be afforded the freedom to play the way they want to, without being limited by the mindset of their guardians.

High-quality play also requires space - both physical and psychological. In terms of physical space, there needs to be enough of it, and it has to be of good quality (more on this later). Psychological space, Brussoni explains, "involves the feeling that somebody has their back" so that kids "feel like they have the latitude to try and try these experiments."

Create a play space with loose parts and materials

Brussoni and her team are currently developing a playability index to find out what elements are necessary to create a high-quality outdoor play space in neighbourhoods.

In her interviews with hundreds of children, one factor stood out: the freedom to build on imagination. In the typical North American playground, equipment is fixed and the options for play are limited; there is only so much you can do with a slide, monkey bars or swings.

Instead, Brussoni's team recommends removing all this structure, and instead providing loose materials such as logs, mud, tarps, crates, sticks, planks, ropes and even water to play with.

These elements can often be found in nature, vacant lots and even junkyards, but the most important element in any play space is, again, the psychological and physical space to take risks.

To learn more, watch on The Nature of Things.

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Risky play for children: Why we should let kids go outside and then get out of the way

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It turns out play with an element of risk may be exactly what today's kids are missing

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Online Games link for Parents, Guardians and Educators!

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Online Games link for Parents, Guardians and Educators!

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This is a fun website with online games for when students have a rainy day at home and parents can put on. This can also be changed for specific grade level needed.

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ABCya! * First Grade Learning Games, Ages 6 - 7

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Kids LOVE our free online games! Fly dragons, build dream houses, and explore while practicing addition, reading, and more 1st grade skills. Play now!

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This source is really great because it talks about all things rough and tumble play. It talks about the many benefits also!

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Rough play and play fighting can be fun. It can also help children develop social and physical skills. Ground rules can prevent children from getting hurt.

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All of these activities can be used for children with ALL abilities. With that being said, some children play in different ways and that is okay. Just make sure you find what makes your student/children be able to play in their best way!

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https://www.healthline.com/health/childrens-health/cooperative-play#examples

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/parenting/risky-play.html

https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/risky-play-for-children-why-we-should-let-kids-go-outside-and-then-get-out

https://www.education.vic.gov.au/childhood/professionals/learning/ecliteracy/interactingwithothers/Pages/sociodramaticplay.aspx