EYE SUPPLEMENT Professional Book Review: Moments of play

No frills, this short book follows a format that is easy to understand. With Harry Potter trade links, Bloomsbury Education has created a bitesize product from the team behind the popular My First Five Years parenting app, led by renowned early childhood experts Alistair Bryce-Clegg and Jennie Johnson. Everyday activities are presented which support play and contribute towards the developmental welfare of individual infants. The lessons are neatly pieced together to form a 96-page account that can be of immense help to parents and early years educators.

The authors have clearly produced excellent prescriptive measures aiming to support the development of babies in line with their natural spontaneity, in a way that offers definite advantages to the new born and guardian alike. The book has six chapters and these focus on six themes supporting skills ranging from ‘gross motor’ to ‘cognitive’. These bring to the scene an air of formality that does not reflect the essentially casual tone employed by the work, which can best be described as informal and spontaneous. Chapter one depicts social and emotional streams; chapters two and three ‘gross motor’ and ‘fine motor’; chapters four, five and six address sensory, language and cognitive skills and make for a good number of easy and realistic ideas for play.