How many of you remember the excitement of playing red rover in the backyard? Or setting up a pretend grocery store in your room with just you and your stuffed animals? While those days may be long gone for you, they should still be prevalent in your children’s upbringing.
Recess and playtime is an important part of children’s learning processes. There is a wealth of data on the power of play and the difference that unstructured play can make on the health and well-being of a child.
Here are just a few ways children learn through play:
- As children touch and manipulate everything within reach, they’re learning the difference between soft and hard, cold and warm, scratchy or smooth, etc.
- Ever see a toddler hurl an object out of their crib for fun? As infants and toddlers throw and fling things about in their world, they’re mastering heavy and light.
- We all know just about everything gets tested in a toddler’s mouth. As they chew, suck and drool their way through life, they come to learn about sweet and sour.
- All babies (and toddlers for that matter) love to make noise. Whether their engulfed in laughter or smashing building blocks over and over again. This helps them learn about quiet and loud, and pleasing or raucous
- It seems all lessons in life are learned through trial and error. Same goes for children in learning what works and doesn’t work, as they pull and push, fit, stack and destroy.
At the core of Kiddie Academy’s education program is our belief in “learning through play.” Children in our academies learn with their whole bodies, explore their surroundings freely, talk with peers and teachers about what they are learning, organize their thoughts through trial and error, and discover how to relate to others. Learning through play meets the needs of all types of learners – visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. It allows children to develop socially, cognitively, emotionally and physically.
So the next time you need to occupy your children just make way for play! Be a kid again…you know you want to!
