Findings

In today’s nurseries many of our guidance documents have the words “meaningful play” within them. With these documents that all have different variations of these words, for example Play Scotland (2020) say for practitioners that “they need to set up interesting spaces and when the experiences on offer are set in meaningful contexts.” But as a practitioner what does this mean for our practice? In Realising the Ambition: Being me, it states that practitioners notice when to pause, engage and extend my learning and interests, through meaningful conversations and interactions. Is this happening within our settings today? Have practitioners got enough time to have these conversations and do they understand when these conversations are happening within the setting?

When I spoke to practitioners during the inquiry at the setting and shared the Play Scotland quote, I asked them what they thought meaningful play was. They used phrases such as ‘child led play,’ ‘learning though play,’ and having choices. They all said words associated with the quote, but when asked if they could give an explanation, they were hesitant but could give examples of what they could do to help during their practice.

During this project I observed twelve different children for a set period. The children had different abilities, aging from one to five years old. When I observed some of the staff you could see that they had taken an interest in the child and were trying to extend their learning. With these members of staff, you can see that they are starting to implement Froebel’s values at they are working with the children’s parents/carers and trying to extend the children’s learning by asking questions and interacting with them during their play. For example, one practitioner extends child A’s learning when they had a doctor’s kit. The practitioner was asking them questions about the equipment, showing them how to use it and letting them have a go at using the equipment. From this, Child A then told their peers what they had learnt and demonstrated what they had learnt by showing how to use the kit.

For the other practitioners at the setting, they had different approaches as they were asking children to take part in different activities that had been set up during the day. They were asking questions but some of the children didn’t understand the questions that were being asked or the questions were pitched at the wrong age. For example, one of practitioners was asking how many angles a shape has which the child lost interest and walked away from the activity.

I found that the practitioners that take time to improve their practice, self-evaluate themselves and learn about the children in their centre have a deeper understanding of meaningful play and use different techniques based on the children’s play situation.

Conclusion

This research has opened a future development opportunity for practitioners to upskill, guidance to relevant reading and visiting other sites that demonstrate meaningful play for them to improve their practice. When doing this research some of the practitioners could demonstrate how to implement meaningful play but others could not and for the benefit of the children, they care for they need to continue to develop their practice.

This inquiry has also demonstrated that the guidance documents that are produced by statutory bodies do not define the words meaningful play, so practitioners must interpret what this means, which shows that they have different definitions and when they put it into their practice it shows in different ways. We as adults are unable to put meaningful play into practice when we do not have a definition or good example to follow.