Primary – Preschool Play

Play Writing Versus Real writing

This term, our unit of inquiry based on How We Express Ourselves, and the central idea is Through Play We Explore and Express Ideas to Come to New Understandings. Preschool inquires closely into different types of play and what they learn from the games/ toys that they play. An important part of the children’s inquiry is about how they communicate through play. Through this line of inquiry, children explore different strategies to communicate with their peers both verbally and in written form.

During the past two weeks, we have been focusing on the written form of communication that children engage with while they play. We set up a pirate ship in one of our play areas where children needed to write messages for other pirates and draw treasure maps for them. In this area, they were introduced to the term ‘play writing’, which means they just draw random marks on the page. As they get more ‘tuned’ into sounds in words and the letters of the alphabet, they start to write random letters. This play writing helps to motivate children. It encourages them to make marks on paper as the beginning point for real writing.