Children benefit in many ways from play. Play provides children with an excellent way to express their feelings and conceptions of the world in which they live. Play also provides a forum in which researchers can capture, understand and interpret children's voices and views. Like many countries around the world, Vietnam is currently reforming their early childhood education curriculum to provide a play-based, child centred and outcomes focused approach to early childhood education. In order to capture children's interest and promote child initiated and directed learning, educators and policy makers need to consider how children interpret their personal play lives. This study presents data from children's programs in nine kindergartens and cultural programs in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Children's drawings and stories were collected to document young children's conceptions of play in Vietnam at the turn of the millennium. Through these 353 drawings and stories, key themes in the children's play lives were identified. The purpose of this study is to examine children's views about play. What do they like to play? How do they define play? How are young Vietnam's children's conceptions of their play influenced by cultural attitudes and expectations? In addition, the study proposes some new play-based, child centred and outcomes focused approaches to curriculum development for Vietnamese early childhood programs.

The thesis is aimed at children?s drawing and its development between the first and the second grade of elementary school. The theoretical part describes individual stages of development of younger school age children and older school age children - pubes-cence. The work also includes general information about children?s art expression and its stages of development and also about a human figure drawing. The research study follows children?s human figure drawing and its transformation within the period be-tween the first and the second grade of elementary school. The findings were studied according to certain criteria.