Introduction:

I will be doing a project on which gender has more influence to play in home corner and what play also interacts with children? The reason I am doing this projects is because this project is going to help me find out the differences in each gender’s role. I want to find why children at the age of 4-5yrs do not play with the other gender (e.g. Girls with boys and boys with girls.) The three questions I will be focusing on are

  1. How gender effects home corner?
  2. How play promotes children’s relationship with peers and adults in home –corner?
  3. Does resources of multicultural determine the gender of home corner?

Home corner is a role-play that supports an individual in their learning about knowledge and understanding of the world.  

Play enables children to learn by exploring, to practise skills, to learn to use imagination in order to understand how things work and to understand social roles.

Culture is a set of learned beliefs, values and behaviours the way of life shared by the members of a society. ()
Culture is the collection of values and norms associated with the group. Culture is intended to describe all the features of a group that make it different and distinct from other groups. Culture differences due to different life and learning experiences can effect communication and understanding.

Gender is the sex of an individual (boy and girl or man and woman).

Literature Review:

History of play

In 1873, Spencer “declared that play activity, driven by surplus energy is directed towards activities which have a prominent role in the animal's/person's life. He emphasised a close relationship between art and play saying that  ". Art is but one kind of play." 
There are many types of plays the children learn from:

Sensory-motor play. 

Sensory/ Messy play touching, smelling, tasting and looking helps the child explores and experience the world through their senses, they then begins to explore objects, materials and toys outside themselves. 

Games with rules. 

Playing games with rules helps the child understand that you need to share and give a turn when playing with some toys. It gives the child an opportunity to learn about rules, which help a child become more disciplined and helps them share with each other.

Symbolic play

Children often represent their social world through symbolic play. Children signal that they are about to start, or change playing; by various methods such as saying  "do you want to play with me?" "Now I'm a monster" and close the playing by negating the roles "I'm not dead any more" marking boundaries of when children enter and leave the play. 
Symbolic play enables the experience of subjective realities in alternative environments, whilst also sharing this experience with others. The participants agree

To create an alternative reality. 
Abused children find symbols or metaphors to describe their pain, thus allowing them to explore past relationships in a multi-dimensional way and make some meaning and resolution of their past. 

Freud identified his theories of play as a repetition of symbolic games being the ego attempt to repeat actively a traumatic event, previously experienced passively, thus allowing the child to gain mastery over the event. From this, a psychoanalytic approach to child analysis developed which used play to interpret the child's unconscious motivation. The two people, on the whole, who were responsible for this development, are Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, through their work with neurotic children.   ( http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/9158/play.htm)

Recently there have been many theorists who have written many articles and journals about children and their imagination in play. Every child is unique, and has his/her own imagination that he/she can’t share with his friends or anyone else. Most theorists have different views about how play is important in the child’s life (e.g. Albert Bandura (born in 1925). Albert Bandura argues that people learn from what they see and hear, and that people often imitate or copy others without external reinforcement and conditioning association-taking place.

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Bandura argued that people are not only influenced by reinforcement but they are also influenced by what they see in the media and what happens to other people. Bandura argues that people will model themselves on other people who are rewarded or ‘reinforced’.

Learning undoubtedly influences human development, conditioning and imitation in learning how local environment is about influencing people at different levels.

Home-corner:

Most children spend their time in home corner and try many things that they have seen from other people e.g. pretending to cook like they might have seen mummy cooking in the kitchen, or ...

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