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Journal Article Review - PLAY

Emily Silver

Germanna Community College

CHD 120 W01S

Teresa Conour

September 25th 2022

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The journal article talked about in this review is, “ The Case of Brain Science and Guided Play:

A Developing Story”, which gives two different aspects of taking a someones classroom

experience and then grouping it into sections of where they put areas of development and skills

matched with the Head Start teacher Ms. Elena’s different learning styles she does in the

classroom. Each of the paragraphs has scholarly sources cited which provided this article with

proven scientific information which gives more knowledge to the journal then just what Ms.

Elena experiences.

The benefits that this article gave is that it showed how the childrens were reacting while

playing and what form of the brain that is affected into where the child can learn and grow from.

What can be challenging is having a kid with “ADD” or “ADHD” to where it can be difficult to

get them to pay attention to what playing is all about and what learning aspects can come from it.

If one of the kids who have one of these disorders then they could fail not knowing story lines

and roles with certain toys for example we have a little boy named Eric and he loves to be active

and playing with multiple things at once, but when a teacher comes around and asks him what

are his toys doing and he says the farmer is going to put out the fire in the coop where the cows

live and cows go “neigh”. This comes to a struggle for some teachers and some strategies to help

them would be to have more one on one correspondence with the kid because as adults we can

keep up and predict what the child might do next based on their actions but kids cannot, that's

why kids are so unpredictable. With the one on one correspondence the teacher can tell the child
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what the farmer actually does and that firemen or women take out fires and can go over what

each of the farm animals noises they make.

What’s recommended to teacher and parents is to ask about what their child is playing

with which can enhance their language skills as well answering questions they we asked. It could

help in many ways if the kid was playing with shapes and you could ask them how many sides a

square has and they would answer 4, so that would be an example of incorporating math and

geometry into your child's brain. Another way you can help with play is to do science

experiments and asking the child what they think is going to happen which can lead them to

knowing how to create a hypothesis and what can happen afterwards in a fun activity. Playing

with the kids can be useful as well when it comes to playing with animals or puppets which gets

the child to understand what animals or people do in their lives or if they want to be creative then

let the kid assign their toy a role and what they do which makes their toy the way they are. There

are many different types of play and the possibilities are endless on the things you can learn

while playing and which is why playing is very beneficial to a kid's growth.
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References

The case of brain science and guided play: A developing story. NAEYC. (n.d.). Retrieved

September 25, 2022, from

https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/may2017/case-brain-science-guided-play