The power of play in childhood | Integrated Learning Therapy

We are very aware of how children love to play. Indeed, they need to play. Not only because it gives them pleasure but also because it is a vitally important part of their learning.

Texas A&M University published an article stressing the power of play. In it, they write that play is how young children make sense of the world. Through their toys, they use play to explore, experiment, and learn. Research recommends that, in early childhood, children have at least an hour of open-ended play each day.

During this time, they should be encouraged to ask questions, test ideas and engage in creative thinking. Play is not just fun but forms a foundation for their development and learning. Play supports cognitive growth, language and communication skills, social and emotional development, physical coordination, creativity, and overall school readiness.

The writers offer some tips as to how parents can support their child’s development as they play. Here are three strategies.

Let your child lead

Notice what your child is already doing during play. You don’t need to give instructions or take control — just follow their lead and support their curiosity. Join in by asking open-ended questions that encourage deeper thinking. For example, if your child is building a tower, you might say, “Oh no, it keeps falling! What can you do to make it stronger?” Being nearby and engaged shows your child that their ideas matter and helps them build problem-solving skills through play.

Provide a variety of materials

Instead of offering just one type of toy, try giving your child multiple kinds of play materials at once. For example, provide blocks as well as cars, dolls, and figurines too! Your child might build a house for the dolls or create an entire town with roads, buildings, and characters. Mixing materials encourages creativity, problem-solving, and storytelling, opening the door to endless imaginative possibilities.

Narrate and label

As your child plays, talk about what they’re doing in the moment. This might sound like narrating emotions— “I can see you’re feeling a big emotion right now. You seem excited to start building with the blocks?”—or labelling their actions— “Wow, you are building a tall tower! You were so creative in the way you built your tower with more blocks on the first row and just one block on the last row!” By narrating and labelling during play, you help your child develop language to describe their behaviours, build new vocabulary, reinforce concepts like colours, shapes, and actions, and support their emotional awareness. Most importantly, describing children’s behaviour shows your child that you’re tuned in and encourages them to keep exploring and expressing themselves.

Article provided by Texas A&M University

Image provided by Freepik

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.