Why Play is Important for a Child in Early Childhood Education
Filed under: Why Play is Important for a Child in Early Childhood Education
No matter in what country they live, no matter their environment or circumstances, every child must have play. It’s absolutely necessary for children to play, to express themselves social, emotionally and physically. Play allows itself to be an individual creation or to be shared with others, it can be pulled in any direction letting it be turned into anything a child would like, preparing a healthy start to a lifetime of learning. One of the most important things about play is that involves having fun. It gives a child a strong head start in life by exploring in many different directions.
The adult’s job is to provide the environment and ideas that maximize play’s potential benefits, allowing children to develop their social skills. One of the ways to do this is to provide and encourage games that are fun, exciting and positive for children. Cooperative games build many social skills. These skills allow the child to form strong friendships and family relationships.
Activities that involve interacting with others teach children not only about themselves but also about other children’s feeling needs and wants. Since they have learnt to value others’ emotions they develop skills to handle confrontations and conflicts in the future.
As well as being socially and emotionally equipped a child need to develop physical strengths. Play has a huge impact in this development for children of varying ages, abilities and interests. Physical play strengthens a child’s fine motor skills as well as gross motor skills. Fine motor skills include such things as eye, mouth, wrist, finger and toe movements, whereas motor skills are the exercise of the larger muscle groups like the arms, legs and torso. Play involving movement is critical for strengthening and stimulating the child’s muscles, nerves and brain.
Social, emotional and physical learning are all involved in play. Cognitive development comes hand in hand with all three of these developments and play is an important vehicle of this. Play gives children the opportunity to understand the world, interact with others in social ways and to express and control emotions. Play provides an opportunity for children to practice newly acquired skills and attempt or challenge tasks, they start to solve complex problems that they would not or could not otherwise do. All these things are needed for a child to get a healthy start in life.