By Kathy Eugster
November 29, 2024
Play is a child’s natural way of learning. From building with blocks to role-playing an imaginary character, every play activity helps develop your child’s knowledge and essential life skills. Research strongly shows that play boosts physical, intellectual, emotional, and social development in children and in some cases, play can be more effective in developing these skills that “traditional” or more “highly guided” teaching approaches.
This means that play activities can not only be entertaining for your child, but they can also have a particular learning objective or focus. You can help your child develop and learn by guiding and supporting them in the exploration and mastery of new skills through fun play activities. There are essentially unlimited fun activities that will challenge and encourage your child to explore, take risks, and enjoy the mastery of new situations and tasks.
A huge benefit of learning through play is that it can generate many positive and developmentally important feelings for children. Here are some feelings that can be elicited when children learn through play: Happy, Joyful, Playful, Satisfied, Curious, Interested, Excited, Confident, Capable, Proud. All of these feelings are essential for healthy development in children.
Helping your child learn through play requires a blend of both parent-directed and child-directed approaches. This provides children with the guidance and scaffolding needed to support learning, while also supporting children’s autonomy and decision-making skills in their learning. In other words, sometimes you will want to guide and direct your child, as in parent-directed play, and at other times you will want to let your child determine what to do and how to do it, as in child-directed play.
Please see the following blogs for more information on these two types of play:
6 Key Concepts for Child-Directed Play with Your 3-10 Year-old Child
Parent-Directed Playtime: Different Than Child-Directed Playtime But Just as Important!
Depending on the learning objective you would like to focus on for your child, you would choose an appropriate play activity that focuses on the specific skills you want to build or strengthen.
What skills can you help your child learn through play?
Physical skills include gross and fine motor skills, movement, balance, and coordination skills, imitation skills, and proprioceptive skills.
- When you want to challenge your child’s physical abilities, you would choose activities that have an active physical component to them, such as running, jumping, climbing, and balancing.
- When you want to support your child with fine motor skills, you would choose activities that require them using their hands and fingers, such as building or making things.
Intellectual skills include observation, focus and attention, memory, thinking, planning, problem-solving, imaginative, and creative skills.
- When you want to help your child with attention, focus, and impulse control skills, you would choose activities that are fun but also require using these skills, for example games like Simon Says or Red Light/Green Light.
- When you want to help your child develop their planning and creative skills, you would focus on activities that allow your child to make or build something, such as setting up a fort or making a bracelet.
- When you want to support your child with thinking skills, you would choose activities and games that encourage strategic thinking and problem-solving, such as board or card games.
- When you want to encourage your child’s imagination, you would provide open-ended toys and props that can be used in many different ways, such as dress-up items or miniature toy figures, that would encourage pretend or imaginary play.
Emotional skills include emotional intelligence, self-awareness, empathy, and self-regulation skills.
- When you want your child to learn empathy skills, you would focus on role-playing different characters in different situations and role-model a variety of feelings, for example in make-believe or pretend play
- When you want to focus on developing your child’s independence skills, you would facilitate child-directed play where your child takes responsibility for making their own choices and decisions and directing how the play unfolds.
- When you want to help your child learn to manage their emotions, you would choose those play activities that would regulate their nervous system and prevent them from becoming over-aroused and over-stimulated.
Social skills include skills for interaction, language and communication, cooperation and teamwork, playing fairly, following rules, and winning and losing.
- When you want to stimulate your child to engage together in play, you would choose those activities that are interesting, exciting, and possibly even surprising for your child.
- When you want to support your child in developing teamwork skills, you would choose those activities that require some degree of cooperation and working together, such as playing a cooperative game or building something together according to a plan.
- When you want to help your child with the concept of winning and losing, you would play some kind of competitive game that is age appropriate, such as a board or card game.
Academic skills can also be supported through play activities as well.
- When you want to help your child with math and numeracy skills, you would choose activities involving numbers, counting, and sorting.
- When you want to focus on scientific exploration, you would choose activities with a science focus such as nature play or simple science experiments.
- When you want to focus on language development, you would tell stories, act out play scenarios, or engage in word games.
Each playtime is unique. Parents can focus on different play activities with different learning objectives at different times.
Here are some more things to consider
- Many play activities have more than one learning goal. For example, active games may focus primarily on physical development; however, many of these games also focus on other skills, such as teamwork and cooperation, focus and attention, playing fairly, and strategic thinking skills.
- The toy or activity chosen for your child must be appropriate for their level of physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development. Plan activities that are neither too hard nor too easy for your child to master.
- Also, know your child’s learning style. Your child may be a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner. Focus on activities that incorporate your child’s preferred style of learning. For example, your child may learn better by watching you do something rather than being told what to do.
- Provide information and instructions to your child in an interesting and playful manner. Children engage well in learning when they are provided with interesting and age-appropriate information.
- Allow some independence. Allow your child some time and space to follow directions, figure things out, and solve the problems they may encounter in play. It is very easy for most parents to step in too soon to rescue their children from working on difficult tasks. Don’t take over doing things your child is able to do. Do only what your child cannot do, and then allow your child to master the rest of the task on their own.
- On the other hand, you don’t want to let your child struggle with something until they are overly frustrated, are in despair, or have given up. When things get too hard for your child, it is appropriate for you to support your child in some way to master a task. You may support your child physically, provide information, ideas, and suggestions for your child to consider, or you may do a small part of the task yourself until your child is able to continue on their own.
- Keep things fun! Although you may be directing and guiding your child, avoid putting yourself strictly in the role of being a teacher to your child. Remember that the goal is to have fun together and not to engage in a power struggle during playtime. Save the formal teaching for other times.
Finally,
Play is the heart of childhood learning. By engaging in play with your child, you are not only helping your child build important skills, you are also fostering a love of learning in a way that feels natural and joyful.
References
Mardell, B., Ryan, J., Krechevsky, M., Baker, M., Schulz, T. S., and Liu-Constant, Y. (2023). A pedagogy of play: Supporting playful learning in classrooms and schools. Cambridge, MA: Project Zero. https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/PoP%20Book%203.27.23.pdf
Parker, R., Thomsen, B.S., & Berry, A. (February 16, 2022). Learning through play at school: A framework for policy and practice. Frontiers in Education Vol 7. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2022.751801/full
Smith, PK, & Pellegrini, A. (March 2023). Learning Through Play. In: Tremblay RE, Boivin M, Peters RDeV, eds. Smith PK, topic ed. Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development [online]. https://www.child-encyclopedia.com/play/according-experts/learning-through-play.
You may want to consider this:
If you are interested in learning more about parent-child or caregiver-child play, please see my book, Play Skills for Parents: Connecting With Your Child Through Play.
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Copyright Kathy Eugster, MA, 2024.
Please feel free to pass on this article to anyone you think might find it useful.
Contact me at: keugster@telus.net