In an early learning classroom, teacher Oriana Ramunno is a fly, buzzing around. Half a dozen small children take on the role of spiders (their little fingers crooked as fangs) and strings of web. Another teacher, Rebecca Lewis – the school's director of early learning – shifts from being a fly to being a bird-eating a spider. Towards the end, the children all get on the floor and roll themselves into balls, signifying egg sacs spun from the web, waiting for spring to come.

All this is happening in a tight space and with great seriousness. There's no giggling or mucking around. The children, aged four and five, have done this before – and today, somewhat proud of themselves, they're repeating the exercise as a means of educating The Sunday Age about the complexities of an ecosystem.

This is play – with teachers down on the carpet – as a means of both learning and demonstrating abstract thinking.

This close engagement is a dialogue of sorts – along the lines that Socrates had with young philosophers, posing them a problem, and together working it out.

Following the Charlotte's Web project, the class produced a gorgeous film about the ocean's food chain and the vital role of whale poo – with the children taking turns to explain importance of plankton and krill.

Ms Lewis has found that the more complex the project – and the greater the challenges upon the children's imagination – the more engaged they are.

"There has been a shift towards considering the social situation as a source of development, the importance of cognitive development and the role of the teacher in this learning," Lewis says. "The ability to move in and out of imagination is fundamental for developing abstract thinking skills, which is essential for concept development."

Each child, she says, comes with their own rich experiences and knowledge and when the teachers enter their play through shared imaginary situations involving story and emotion, "then collaboratively the conceptual learning and relational links are much deeper".

Preshil kindergarten teacher Stewart Thorn previously worked in IT and the film industry. He says that research from the past 10 years has led to a big shift in understanding what children can do, and how they can learn it.

"What we know is that children are primed for high concept learning from birth. It's about exposure," he says. "The more exposure to concepts and ideas, the more likely you're comfortable with them in the future. That's what we're teaching for, the future."

It's worth noting that Thorn and Ramunno have attained master's degrees to support their work here.

The Preshil project of creating "scientific play worlds" is informed by Lewis' PhD studies and by the research of Marilyn Fleer, Monash University's professor of early childhood education. In 2011, Professor Fleer published a paper that introduced the theory of "conceptual play" as a response to the "international trend to increase the cognitive achievement of early childhood children [that] has generated a need for better understanding how concept formation occurs within play-based programs".

The federal government's 2009 Early Years Learning Framework promotes the idea of "intentional teaching", which involves a more engaged and responsive approach working with small children, including problem solving.

"As such there is an expectation that teachers will be more conceptually focused," Professor Fleer says. "However, in many contexts … this has proven to be challenging, because teachers generally have followed a philosophy of not interfering in children's play."

The Sunday Age understands that conceptual play has been trialled in a number of learning centres in Victoria over the past few years. It marks a shift away from long-held child development models of fixed milestones and the belief that children weren't capable of complex abstract and concept learning until they were well into primary school.