Children Learn Through Play

Have you ever watched a baby in a highchair drop a toy and watch it fall to the floor?

Probably the first time she dropped it was an accident, but she will repeat the experience. After you retrieve the dropped toy she will quickly throw it down again, cry for you to get it and then throw it down again. The game will go on for as long as you have patience for it, but baby won't soon give up. She is fascinated! Gravity exists!

As she grows, her curiosity will move on to other things, but the basic pattern will continue. Your growing child needs to experience things for herself in order for her to truly understand them. She does this by playing.

How We Learn Best

It turns out that our brains can process information better when we learn with fun and positive emotions. Good teachers have known this all along because they see the results when their students get excited about a new idea and have fun with it. Teachers see the opposite as well when a class of bored students experience more frustration than success. This isn't to say that all learning comes without some effort and even struggle, but we are most motivated and can learn concepts most quickly and make them our own when we learn them in a positive playful manner.

If this is true for adults, it is even more true for children.

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Play Helps Children Discover Who They Are

Imaginative play gives a child the opportunity to problem solve and to figure out what his place is in the world. In this type of play, a child tries out what it would feel like to be a Dad, or a firefighter, or a super hero. He is developing his ability to understand another person's viewpoint. He is learning to face what he is afraid of as well as explore what he is interested in. Playing doctor allows a child to work out fears of visiting a doctor in real life. It also allows him to imitate things he has seen another do.

Play Is How We Learn to Negotiate and Get Along with Others

Kids learn how to cooperate when they play with other kids with different ideas from their own. They learn how to negotiate, and how to get along with others. During play a child can practice vocabulary she wouldn't have a chance to use in her ordinary speech. She learns to solve problems that arise in working together with other children. When negotiating with other children in play, she learns what words work and what words don't.

Water and Sand Play

When children get the opportunity to play in water and sand, they have an easier time understanding the concepts of volume and fractions when they are introduced to them in elementary school. They can draw on years of experience of filling buckets and dumping them out. If they have had measuring cups and spoons to play with, they will know from experience that two half cups will fit into one whole cup. Formal math makes so much more sense when a child has spent years organizing and rearranging things in her world!

Play Dough

Playing with play dough is another way to learn spatial concepts. You and your child can form shapes with the dough. You can roll snakes and form them into numbers and letters. The tactile feel of it gives you another sense with which to process information. Play dough is also a way to release tension.

Blocks

Building with blocks aids with spatial understanding and introduces geometric shapes. Children can build their towers high or they can lay them horizontally. The same number of blocks can take many different shapes and still remain the same number. How much more sense geometry will make when a child has learned about perimeters and volume in this concrete way over and over again without even hearing the words spoken?

Pretend Using Money

When children play "store" or "bank," they learn how we use numbers and money in our everyday lives. They practice how they've seen their parents deal with money.

Board Games and Puzzles

Board games and puzzles help a child with problem solving and turn taking. As they progress around a board, children develop one-to-one correspondence and perfect their counting skills.

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Physical play is essential for developing young bodies and minds. We are not compartmentalized beings -- what affects our bodies affects our minds, our souls, and our spirits, and vice versa -- when our bodies are fit, we tend to think more clearly and to handle problems more easily. Especially for those who are kinesthetic learners, using movement in learning brings our whole persons into play.

Developing Fine Motor Skills

Through play, children practice their gross motor and fine motor skills. Fine motor skills refers to the development of the muscles in the fingers and hands. These muscles will be needed for a child to learn to hold a pencil and manouever it in forming letters and numbers. Children can develop fine motor skills by manipulating play dough, by stringing beads or cheerios, by practicing cutting with scissors, or any other activity that uses the fingers and hands.

Developing Gross Motor Skills

Gross motor skills refers to the development of the muscles required for moving one's body through space. Children need experiences of moving their bodies to gain spatial understanding. They learn about right and left, balance, and many of the forces of nature, such as gravity, thrust, and momentum. Children need to run and jump, to stretch their muscles and strengthen their bones. They develop a better sense of themselves and their capacities and limits. They also develop habits that can extend into adulthood and keep them healthy.

Using Movement to Learn

Energetic young children who may resist sitting and learning in the more traditional way can often be reached by engaging them with movement. You can teach letters, for instance, by writing a "T" with chalk on pavement and then bouncing a ball while calling out words that begin with the "T" sound. Or the child may lie on the floor and make her body form the shape of the letter she is trying to learn. A group of children could make a whole word this way with each of them forming a different letter. (This is probably only effective with children old enough to already know the individual letters. Forming letters with their bodies deepens their knowledge, helping them experience the letters in a new way.)

Your own imagination can lead you to create new ways to teach your children with their bodies. You can create jump rope ditties to emphasize concepts or make up scavenger hunts using themes you are working with. To return to the learning letters idea, for example, the children could be directed to find five things that begin with the "ch" sound. Or they could perform actions that show opposites -- fast and slow, big and little, loud and quiet, etc.

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