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Pretend play encourages young children to try out different social roles (e.g., daddy, wife, teacher), increase their understanding of social contexts (e.g., family, party, school), explore relationships of authority (e.g., mommy & baby), and experience a sense of control by resolving problems (e.g., doctor makes sick patients well).

In this Thinkprint, Tucker discovers that a tube, with a small hole on one end and a large hole on the other, offers some surprises. Sometimes when he lifts the container, the small blocks he previously placed in the container remain on the floor; sometimes they do not. The results depend on the orientation of the tube. He experiments with several containers and their contents, and he shares his discoveries with his friend Lucy. He also discovers how to make his container even deeper by joining two fitted-pipe sections together.

Ben, now three years old, returns to one of his favorite pastimes, the pool table. By using the cue sticks to build a ramp, Ben creates an unconventional way to roll the balls. Uncle George joins Ben at the pool table and, together, they consider how to aim the ramp so that the balls roll into the pocket. We hear Ben ask why the balls all go to the same place on the table. He wonders why the distribution is not random. We see how a young child often answers a "Why?" question with a description, or a demonstration of "How," instead of separating the cause from the effect.

Children sometimes encounter resistance when attempting to join an ongoing pretend play episode. The negotiated features of collaborative pretend play (roles, props, scripts) are vulnerable to the introduction of a new participant. Naturally, children are cautiously protective of established play interactions. To their credit, many children learn to treat this initial resistance as an opportunity to invent clever strategies for gaining entry into the play.

Teachers and parents generally expect gross motor play to strengthen young children’s physical development. Perhaps less expectedly, gross motor play with large objects also affords young toddlers opportunities to increase their awareness of peers, to experience a sense of membership in a social group, and to nurture early friendships.

This videative illustrates the various goals, strategies, and theories that toddlers use in order to reach a helium balloon that has floated to the ceiling. The children try standing on wooden blocks, first one, then two. But adding blocks to the stack presents a new problem. The taller the stack the less stable the structure. Eventually a child solves the problem by standing on a chair, an unusual use for this familiar object. In this videative we see children thinking about size, position, distance, and new uses for familiar objects.

In this set of clips, five-year-old Chris builds with square window blocks on a classroom table. This videative provides an excellent opportunity to watch Chris solve spatial problems. He modifies block orientation and placement to find each block's center of gravity. He persistently works to achieve bilateral symmetry in the design of his structure. Eventually we see that he understands the implication of how fitting one block here now means that he is also able to place the other block there.

Why do toddlers find apparently ordinary objects so engaging? Toddlers gain knowledge about the physical world by acting on such objects. In fact, the meaning of an object is often understood in terms of what the toddler can do with it. Through play toddlers learn how objects can be related to the self and to other objects. By reflecting on the effects of their actions, young children are increasingly able to construct more complex spatial relationships and formulate new concepts about the physical world.

Opportunities for enhancing and extending young children’s learning often arise during everyday activities. Children are naturally motivated to make sense of the challenges presented by real life problems. As educators, it is important to take risks and attempt to further such experiences by helping children generate their own questions, formulate and test their own hypotheses, and discover what information is necessary to solve a problem. Young children often surprise us with their tenacity for the subject at hand.

Friendships are important to children’s growing understanding of the social world. A friendship is one of the earliest relationships in which children begin to care about, try to understand, and respond to the feelings and needs of someone else. Friendships allow children to experience the emotional satisfaction of sharing and doing things together without the aid of an adult.