Importance of Play
Play enhances the development of a child. Play is an innate part of everybody’s childhood. Why is play important? What do children gain and learn through play? How does play progress as children grow? What are the stages of play? These are some of the questions we at All About Child have attempted to answer in this video.
Stages of Play:
Stage 1 – (0 to 2 years): In this stage the children mostly enjoy exploring and playing by themselves or with an adult indulging in solitary play.
Stage 2 – (2 to 2.5 years): In this stage the children like observing others around indulge in play.
Stage 3 -( 2.5 to 3 years): In this stage there is little interaction with peers but they happily play alongside, during parallel play.
Stage 4 – (3 to 4 years): In this stage the children play together often sharing and interacting with each other during associative play.
Stage 5 – (4 – 5 years): I this stage the play gets complex with plans rules and regulations specific roles get allotted during cooperative play.
Children need time and space to let their imagination grow. There should be enough boredom for them to start the process of creative use of their so called bored time, the mind needs to rest to be able to innovate and get new ideas.
Children need to engage in the “what if” during play. Only when children are involved in creating their own play will they be more involved and its really hard to distract them from their deep learning processes.
Play is multi-layer and it gets more and more complex as children grow. They build on their past experiences to make deeper meaning. Children need a lot of repetitions before they move from one stage to the next.
When this basic intrinsic urge to play is missing in children even by the age of 2 parents and teachers should start looking for signs of delayed development.
Related videos: https://allaboutchild.org/learn-math-play-dough/
Refer to more videos and articles on the topic “Learning through Play” on our website: allaboutchild.org
