Free Play Workshop

Free play is unstructured, voluntary, child-initiated activity that allows children to develop their imaginations while exploring and experiencing the world around them. It is the spontaneous play that comes naturally from children’s natural curiosity, love of discovery, and enthusiasm.

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Playing with dolls, blocks, moulding clay, crayons and paper, and other loose parts all allow for unstructured creative play. Outdoor play encourages space for all kinds of physical activity, such as building forts, playing on playgrounds, and climbing trees.

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Play theorist, Bob Hughes, has identified sixteen play types. Some of these play types are role-play, dramatic, fantasy, exploratory, creative, social, rough and tumble, locomotors (going from one point to another), and symbolic. These all relate to physical, social, cognitive, creative, and emotional development through free play.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Clinical Report on The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds lists many benefits of free play for children. They include: healthy cognitive development, use of creativity and expansion of imagination, interaction with the world around them, development of social skills in learning to share and resolve conflicts, practice in decision-making skills, and confidence building.

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Jean Piaget wrote extensively in his book, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, about the links between play and intellectual, cognitive development. He outlined a progression of free play activities, such as functional, exploratory, sensorimotor activities (holding a rattle, repeatedly dropping a toy as play) to more symbolic play as the child ages to include building with blocks and pretending to feed a doll. The final developmental stage is when the child can play games with rules, such as tag or marbles.