Why Teaching Children Learning Through Play Is Extremely Important During Their Formative Years
Childhood is an important stage of life as it is a stage at which a great deal of learning occurs.
Children learn through play:
- to make choices
- to share
- to build
- fine motor skills
- to be independent individuals
- to respect their own choices and abilities
- hand eye co-ordination
- language and communication
- cognitive development.
Children learn to explore their own imaginations and they learn through trial and error. They learn time skills. They learn behaviours expected during this playtime and how to act and how to expect others to act. Early numeracy and literacy skills are developed.
Children should be encouraged to engage in a variety of experiences to:
- develop all of their skills
- to teach them self confidence
- so they gain self esteem and self satisfaction from learning new things
- so they do not get bored and stagnant in their learning
- to provide them with many different opportunities and ways of learning things
- to gain physical, emotional, social, communicative abilities
- so that a child will want to learn new things from a range of experiences
- also to show them that new things are not scary
It is necessary to provide opportunities for both group and individual play activities so that children can learn about sharing and be co-operative and social and learn new language and communication skills in group play and feel involved but to also through individual play explore their own abilities through 'trial and error' and allow their creative side to flow while playing alone and being imaginitive, to develop self esteem and confidence in their own choices.
We need to let our children believe they can achieve anything they put their minds to with practice and through trial and error and with no judgement and lots of positive and constructive praise!!
Thank you! Totally agree! Have a couple of little ones at home, 3yrs and 10 months old. Trying hard to let them fail and then let them figure it out. My wife and I just recently restructured our life to be able to live off of 1 small income and home school! We believe that by doing this it will allow for more exploratory learning and less strict state issued curriculum. Gonna try and make a curriculum out of more of what they find interesting where we can instead of forcing them to focus every day on things they have no interest in. Thanks keep posting!
That is SO amazing to read!!! Your children will benefit so much from you teaching them on what will benefit from and what interests them. So many parents nowadays are so focused on trying to get their kids to "academically excel" practically from birth and there is no need for it, each child learns so differently and curriculum for learning needs to be tailored for each individual child and at a level in which they can take in any information as each child hits their own milestones at different times and it definitely needs to be made FUN! :) I will be posting lots more and thanks for your comment :)
I also consider this a very important point. And I fully support this practice. At http://thekidsworldnow.com you can find more information on childcare.