Exploratory Play Analysis

Janet Moyles created the 'play spiral' Framework which encourages children to explore and learn new skills through structured and unstructured play. The spiral starts with practitioners letting the children explore the environment and resources through 'free play' and unstructured play, this gives them the opportunity to play and create their own rules and develop their own experiences. This is beneficial to practitioners as it allows them to observe the children and plan effectively in order to enhance play. The next part of the spiral is 'Mastery Play', this enables the children to rehearse and develop their play. They begin to enhance their play by using their imagination and beginning to understand how they think they should be using the
The next part of the spiral is 'Directed Play', this is when adult intervention is used in order for the children to enhance and enrich their experiences and explore the area using the resources to get the best play and learning out of them. This enables the practitioner to plan based on their previous observations to ensure that each individual child is engaged in the play and their confidence, self-esteem knowledge and understanding is supported by the practitioner and the planning processes. The final stage in the play spiral is 'Exploratory play enriched and enhanced', this is the end of the spiral however it is the beginning of a new spiral as the children will then explore a different part of the environment or activity. At this stage of the spiral, the children will re-visit the activity, using the enrichment and enhanced play from the directed play and will be continuously developing and exploring new skills. At this stage, this allows the practitioner to observe how the children are using the area after the adult intervention, and can then reflect on their own practice and develop further plans and