Article Response Paper on Play, Stories, and Language: Education Coursework

Article Response Paper on Play, Stories, and Language
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Article Response Paper on Play, Stories, and Language
Bedrova and Leong (2003), in their article, Building Language and Literacy Through Play, discuss how play can be transformed into a learning experience for children. Children often incorporate play episodes in their games. However, the kind of play that they perform is too shallow to learn from. Therefore, a teacher needs to find ways to ensure that the play episodes are more helpful to children. This is by ensuring that plays help children in improving their creativity, language, and literacy skills. Since children will base their plays on familiar environments and ideas, it is necessary to broaden their ideas by offering indirect assistance.
A helpful play should incorporate props and objects and combine multiple roles and themes by creating pretense scenarios to solve problems through negotiation (Bedrova & Leong, 2003). These elements develop the language and literacy of children as they play. A teacher’s major role in ensuring plays are helpful to children is offering necessary assistance that is not fully engaging in the game. One can introduce props and how to use them, new play themes, and help children plan their play and create an environment rich in games (Bedrova & Leong, 2003). This way, the teacher ensures that games help children develop their skills.
Playing is key to building flourishing brainpower, healthy physiques, and strong social bonds in children (Yogman et al., 2018). Ostrosky and Meadan (2010) advocate for an adult’s assistance during play to become better and more helpful. A teacher must ensure that they do not become players but are only helping. An example is given to show how this can be done by saying, “you cannot take this puzzle from Lucia, but you can use another” (Bedrova & Leong, 2003). By saying this, a teacher will be helping the children w...