An Invented Game
Three young girls enjoy playing an invented game. The girls work to coordinate their movements, accommodate a third player, and lend structure to their play by singing refrains from a familiar nursery rhyme. Notice how they enjoy the affiliation felt when one follows the other. One girl momentarily takes the lead by pausing the action and waiting to establish eye contact with her friend before initiating a game of peek-a-boo. Observe how the girls use spatial-temporal reasoning to slow their pace and adjust the location of their bodies around the tree in order to include a third player. When her two friends bump heads, the third child rubs her head too. She may do so in order to express empathy and to strengthen the sense of shared experience. What other knowledge do you observe in this delightful episode of spontaneous play?
Keywords: Twos, Child-Child, Maintaining Play, Spatial Relations, Communication
Length of stand alone master video clip: 1 minute 33 seconds
