30/11/2022
🌸Why are play sets used?
When playing, children are developing social skills, they learn how to explore their environments and develop problem-solving and analysing skills. Children’s brains are malleable, meaning they are like a sponge and absorb all information around them. Play teaches them patience, resilience, how to resolve problems and how to connect with others. Playing allows them to process and replicate daily events, environments and everyday learnings (for example, often little ones will mimic grocery shops, cleaning, pushing teddy/baby in the pram etc). Play experiences help best set them up to transfer skills to the big world, which allows them to explore and increase their knowledge and learning. Play can promote communication development, imagination (which develops abstract thinking) and independence, which supports self care, eating and daily tasks.
Play also allows children to make special memories with friends, siblings and loved ones.
🌸Did you know?
- By 3 years, a child’s brain is twice as active as an adults and they have approximately 15,000 brain connections per individual brain neuron (McBroom, 1999) 😶🤗.
- Children rely on sensory experiences, primarily tactile (touch), auditory and visual input to aquire, reflect and develop new knowledge (NTU libraries, 2014).
- Play also promotes curiosity and sparks new thoughts and ideas and children may begin to question the world.
🌸Play supports emotional development as it provides opportunities to experience joy, excitement, frustration and anger which are important for children to experience, so they can learn to recognise, articulate, understand and manage their feelings as they grow. At 3-4 years old, during play, children’s memory expands, they learn to share & take turns and develop tolerance for others joining in with them.
🌸 Play therefore is essential to foster various fundamental skills which encourage appropriate social interactions at kindy/school, help build their fine motor skills to learn to draw and write, increase their attention span, connect and relate to others and be able to take turns and share ideas.
🌸As their amazing little minds develop, their fundamental play skills can positively support school engagement, promote positive friendships and relationships with others, builds foundational skills for them to thrive in kindergarten/prep and supports resilience, confidence and problem-solving skills.
