How does playing help children?


How does playing help children?

How does playing help children?

In an era marked by globalization, children engage in the world around them, actively seeking new knowledge and solving problems. They must persevere in the face of complex challenges and must generate solutions by synthesizing, transforming, and applying information in novel ways. They must be able to communicate, collaborate, and lead effectively. There is a core set of basic skills that children must learn and a carefully planned, scripted pedagogy is the ideal teaching practice. When we view play as a learning process, we gain a broader perspective on the key skill sets that young children must develop to be successful in school. Playful learning –defined as both free play and guided play –is a whole-child educational approach that promotes academic, socio-emotional, and cognitive development. Play activities are fun, voluntary, flexible, involve active engagement, have no extrinsic goals, involve active engagement of the child. Play helps children learn new skills and also to function at the edge of their developing capacities, to take on new social roles, challenging tasks, and problems that they would not otherwise do. Children learn best when they direct action in both a physical and a virtual world. Several activities of children like walking on the floor and then using commands to make the same motions, improve mathematical understanding and problem-solving skills. This may be due to the fact that children have additional practice with the concepts (e.g., moving bodies, walking around, and then translating it to turtle commands). Others have shown mixed results in achievement of kindergarten and elementary students using physical manipulative, virtual manipulative, or a combination of the two. When children engage in free play and guided play activities, they learn about core properties, spatial relations, and causal processes, priming early mathematical and scientific concepts. Children naturally incorporate language into their play activities. In the toddler years, children explore and practice the fundamental components of their language system through private speech, word games, and complex language use during social play. During the elementary years, children engage in different forms of play compared to toddlers. Symbolic play becomes integrated into games with rules, such as competitive board games. Play also becomes more abstract, with an increasing focus on mental. Imaginative play, on the other hand, tends to become more private as children write poetry or short stories or engage in dramatic activities. A substantial body of research shows that play activities serve as contexts in which language and literacy skills advance to new heights. Through play, children create situations that reflect their sociocultural world, where they learn how to subordinate desires to social rules, cooperate with others willingly, and engage in socially appropriate behaviour.

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