In the world of childhood, play is not merely a pastime. It's a powerful developmental tool that cultivates critical life skills, promotes creativity, and bolsters a child's understanding of the world. The benefits of play are numerous and vital for holistic child development. It can foster cognitive growth, physical abilities, new vocabulary, and social skills, and it can even fuel emotional resilience and self-confidence.
As the proud owners of this creche, we are committed to harnessing the potential of play to support your child's development. We have strategically designed our environment to encourage curiosity, exploration, and playful learning. Our team of skilled caregivers recognizes that every child is unique, so we tailor our approach to meet individual needs, nurturing and guiding children as they make sense of the world through play. We provide a variety of carefully chosen toys and materials that inspire imaginative, constructive, and cooperative play. Through this rich mix of resources and our responsive interactions, we facilitate experiences that foster problem-solving skills, encourage communication, and promote understanding of cause and effect. This way, your child doesn’t just play—they learn, grow, and thrive.
Children learn critical skills and will build self worth by developing a sense of their own abilities. Children develop such skills as problem solving, cause and effect, interaction, problem solving and even conflict resolution.
The following article is from the unicef.org website. You can find the full document here.
When children choose to play, they are not thinking “Now I am going to learn something from this activity.” Yet their play creates powerful learning opportunities across all areas of development. Development and learning are complex and holistic, and yet skills across all developmental domains can be encouraged through play, including motor, cognitive and social and emotional skills. Indeed, in playful experiences, children tap a breadth of skills at any one time. Often this occurs during ‘corner play’ or ‘centre time’ in the context of early learning or pre-primary programs. Corner play, when well planned, promotes child development and learning competencies more effectively than any other pre-primary activity. By choosing to play with the things they like to do, children actually develop skills in all areas of development: intellectual, social, emotional and physical.
For example, while children are playing, they can try out new social skills (e.g., sharing toys, agreeing on how to work together with materials), and they often take on some challenging cognitive tasks (such as figuring out how to make a building with smaller blocks when the larger ones are not available). Children are ‘hands-on’ learners. They acquire knowledge through playful interaction with objects and people. They need a lot of practice with solid objects to understand abstract concepts.
By playing with geometric blocks they understand the concept that two squares can form a rectangle and two triangles can form a square. From dancing a pattern such as step forward, step back twirl, clap and repeat, they begin to understand the features of patterns that are the foundation for mathematics. Pretend or ‘symbolic’ play (such as playing house or market) is especially beneficial: in such play, children express their ideas, thoughts and feelings, learn how to control their emotions, interact with others, resolve conflicts and gain a sense of competence.
Play sets the foundation for the development of critical social and emotional knowledge and skills. Through play, children learn to forge connections with others, and to share, negotiate and resolve conflicts, as well as learn self-advocacy skills. Play also teaches children leadership as well as group skills. Furthermore, play is a natural tool that children can use to build their resilience and coping skills, as they learn to navigate relationships and deal with social challenges as well as conquer their fears, for example through re-enacting fantasy heroes.
More generally, play satisfies a basic human need to express imagination, curiosity and creativity, which are key resources in a knowledge-driven world. They help us to cope, to find pleasure, and to use our imaginative and innovative powers. Indeed, the critical skills that children acquire through play in the preschool years form part of the fundamental building blocks of future complex “21st -century skills”
