Benefits of learning through play

Benefits, Ideas, And Tips For Families

We all know kids love to explore and play, but are some ways of playing better than others when it comes to learning through play? How is this style of learning different from regular child’s play?

Our experts at HOMER have compiled a comprehensive list of simple ways to get started with learning through play, plus tips to ensure your child thrives while they engage in various styles of play.

Let’s discover what learning through play means, what the benefits are, and how you can easily implement this valuable learning style at home.

What Is Learning Through Play?

While playtime might sometimes come across as unstructured or frivolous, it’s actually an important part of your child’s development and teaches them valuable life skills.

From playing with blocks to learning about balance and determining which shapes fit together to recognizing letters more easily, engaging in play can teach your child a lot about the world around them.

The many benefits of learning through play include:

• Improving communication skills
• Developing problem-solving abilities
• Teaching conflict resolution
• Nurturing creativity
• Encourages relationship-building
• Promoting independence
• Making meaningful discoveries about the world around them
• Motivating exploration

Academic Learning Vs. Play-Based Learning

Academics are the main focus of many early childhood learning programs. With these, teachers develop structured curriculums to help kids learn the alphabet, numbers, colors, shapes, and more.

This means that the adults are the ones who determine the process of learning, timelines, objectives (i.e., learning colors, letters, etc.), and everything else in-between. On the other hand, learning through play involves more child-directed activities.

While learning-through-play experiences can foster numeracy and literacy, they also help children grow holistically. This includes building their confidence, encouraging them to be naturally inquisitive, and furthering their social-emotional development.

Now that you know a bit more about the idea behind learning through play, let’s take a look at the benefits of this learning approach.

Key Benefits Of Playtime

Play Is Fun

When you see kids playing, their smiles and laughter can be infectious. That’s because playing is fun!

Not only does it provide a healthy endorphin release, but it also allows children to think creatively and use their imaginations to go to pretend lands, become different characters, and develop critical thinking skills.

Play Encourages Social Interaction

While there’s nothing wrong with allowing children to play by themselves (in fact, it’s encouraged), there’s something special that happens when kids play together.

They get to communicate their unique ideas to others and listen to other people’s perspectives. In addition, they learn other important social skills, like compromising, teamwork, and so much more.

As they play with others, children have opportunities to work through the challenges and frustrations that may occur.

For example, your child might express things like:

• Why can’t I go first? Tom always gets the first go, and that’s not fair.
• Skipping is so hard. Everyone else seems to be better than me.
• Sarah wants to do it her way, but I have good ideas, too.

By learning how to work through these frustrations and problem-solve with others, your child develops the skills they need to build happy, healthy, and meaningful relationships.

Play Actively Engages Kids

Depending on the activity, children get the chance to touch, hear, smell, or mold objects they’re using during play. They get to practice skills they’ve learned, develop new ones, test out various possibilities, or even discover new challenges.

This combination of using their senses, stretching their minds, and having physical engagement with the activity in front of them helps children learn and develop.

As a result of such interactions, children get the chance to make sense of the world around them.

Important Elements Of Learning Through Play

For playing to actually have the benefits mentioned above, there are a few key elements that need to be present. Let’s take a look.

1) Enjoyment

This is probably the most obvious point on our list and reiterates what we mentioned above. But the reason kids love to play is that it’s fun! That’s why play needs to be an enjoyable experience for them.

Of course, there will inevitably be disagreements here and there or challenges to overcome, but overall, children should find what they’re doing pleasurable.

2) Flexibility

Too often, adults get fixated on structured learning and reaching specific outcomes. While there’s nothing wrong with having objectives in mind before starting to play, it’s also essential to be flexible.

This means allowing kids the freedom to explore and discover through their activities.

For example, if, during a painting activity the goal was to teach your child that when they mix their blue and yellow paint, they get green, don’t be upset when they mix in red instead of blue by mistake. Now, they’ve discovered how to make orange!

3) Children Leading

Sometimes, when we as adults initiate an activity, we want to lead our children through it. This is because we often feel that we know what’s best.

There’s nothing wrong with helping our kids figure some things out, but it’s also exciting to see them use their own minds to tackle a particular obstacle they’re facing. Try to give your child the opportunity to lead — let them decide how they’ll play and even for how long.

You can then focus on making sure that everyone involved stays safe (this is especially important if the activity involves sharp objects like scissors) and offer suggestions as needed.

Stages Of Play

Learning through play comes in many forms and stages that will carry your child through their developmental years.

Starting with unoccupied play, this stage usually begins between birth and 3 months of age when children start to learn about their bodies and the simple pleasures of kicking their legs.

Solitary play is the next recognizable stage. You might notice your child using their focus to play alone with toys and their organizational skills to make sense of the activities they engage in. Playing alone is completely normal and necessary for development.

In onlooker play, your child may start to observe other children playing. Their brain is busy learning about how to interact with others.

Similarly, in parallel play, your child might play their own game or activity (like PlayDoh or cars) next to another child who is also playing — they’re playing separately, together.

When your child is ready, they’ll begin to engage in associative play. Here, your child gets to put the social skills they’ve been learning into practice by interacting with others. This might look like sharing materials for a craft project or building structures out of blocks together.

Finally, cooperative play is all about sharing resources and working together to achieve a common goal. This stage of play involves utilizing social skills and establishing rules, which can involve healthy conflict resolution and negotiation skills.

It’s important to note that the stages of play should be used as a guide and not hard-and-fast rules. Just because your child has ‘aged out’ of the solitary play stage doesn’t mean they won’t still enjoy it from time to time as they grow up.

Learning through play is about the engagement and enjoyment your child will experience in the moment rather than aiming for a particular end result — just enjoy the process!

Learning Through Play: Ideas By Type

There are many different ways your child can learn through play. We’ve compiled a list of ideas to get you started!

We’ve divided these ideas into categories based on different types of play, but remember they aren’t mutually exclusive — it’s possible to engage in multiple types of play at once.

These play ideas are great for children playing alone, with an adult, or with other children. It all depends on your child’s needs and what they enjoy!

Physical Play

Physical play involves developing motor skills and focuses on moving your body. Any activity that involves running, jumping, climbing, crawling, or practicing balance counts as physical play!

Try incorporating ball games, chasing balloons or bubbles, dancing to music, or creating an obstacle course in the backyard to encourage physical play among children.

Language Play

Children are developing their language skills every day, so encouraging language play is a fun way to build on what they’re learning.

Language play should begin with verbal play, such as riddles, rhyming games, and making up stories. Then you can move on to literacy-based language play, like what we offer at HOMER.

We’ve compiled lists of our favorite writing and spelling games to help you get started enjoying language play! Our Explore Letters Kit is another way to support your child as they develop their literacy and language skills through play.

From developing their imagination to fostering their early writing skills, our Explore Letters Kit acts as the perfect supplement to language play!

Exploratory Play

Children are inherently little explorers, so it’s no surprise that a key type of play is exploratory in nature! This play style is all about your child using their senses to learn about the world around them.

This can be as simple as playing with mud, making slime, creating figures out of PlayDoh, finger painting, or even playing with different textures of food (think squishy pasta versus hard potatoes).

Exploring outdoors with adult supervision is another simple way to get started.

Constructive Play

Constructive play gives children the opportunity to utilize their imagination, fine motor skills, and creativity.

It also provides an outlet for self-expression and teaches children that they can bring the pictures in their minds into reality!

Try drawing pictures with chalk on the sidewalk, building structures out of blocks, creating sock puppets, and using open-ended art materials such as paints, pencils, and paper to see what your child feels like creating.

Fantasy Play

Fantasy play (also called role-playing or imaginative play) is a fantastic way for your child to act out ideas they see in the world as well as make-believe scenarios they create all by themselves.

By incorporating costumes or pieces of material, figurines, puppets, and toy animals, children are free to explore and imagine without fear of judgment.

Fantasy play allows them to learn about various occupations such as doctors and firefighters, societal roles such as parents and caregivers, and fantasy scenarios such as adventures with superheroes and villains.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to fantasy play!

Social Play

Social play involves playing with others. This may be peers their own age, younger siblings, or older adults. It’s important for your child to learn to play with a variety of people and adapt to the needs of others.

This type of play is usually practiced during an additional style of play. For example, while engaging in make-believe play about cooking food or while playing a game of tag, your child will be practicing their social skills along the way.

Utilizing skills such as communication, negotiation, problem-solving, and cooperation is crucial in social play. As children learn and practice these skills, their ability to play in social settings will improve.

Our Explore Feelings Kit can help your child explore these new social skills in a fun, safe way! This specially designed kit provides your child with activities to foster their social-emotional skill development and promotes positive interactions with others.

Challenges Of Integrating Learning Through Play

While the benefits of learning through play are numerous, this approach isn’t without its challenges.

Lack Of Understanding

When parents or guardians don’t understand the value of learning through play, they are not likely to encourage their children to participate in it.

Many adults still view playtime for children as having no connection with learning academic concepts. Instead, play is seen as frivolous and taking away time from “real learning. ”

While some believe that the traditional way of learning (i.e., placing a worksheet in front of a child and evaluating their understanding) is the best and only way to teach children, this isn’t true.

When children play with blocks, paint, do puzzles, or dress up in costumes, they are building a solid foundation for learning shapes and colors, creative thinking, and many other important concepts.

If play is not encouraged, children may actually lose out on critical skill development.

School Days Without Time For Independent Play

During the week, our children spend many of their waking hours at daycare, preschool, or school. But, unfortunately, many schools don’t have enough time in the day to allow for independent play, aside from recess.

In an ideal world, teachers would be trained in how to instill playful learning into the curriculum, but most of the time this is not a child’s school-day experience. That means the home is the perfect place to create an environment friendly to learning through play.

If you’re short on time or unsure of how to create a lineup of appropriate games or activities, our Learn & Play app is the perfect solution!

Designed for children up to three years old, this app is packed with lots of games, stories, and songs to help build a strong foundation for many important skills, such as knowing colors, shapes, the ABCs, and more.

Now that we’ve emphasized the importance of learning through play and discussed some of its challenges, let’s take a look at a few quick tips for making the most of this time!

Quick Tips For Learning Through Play

Show Interest

Showing genuine interest in your child’s play activities is a great way to encourage further positive play experiences.

Talking to your child about their play preferences, asking questions, and getting involved when your child wants you to join in can show your child that you’re interested in and supportive of their play efforts.

Playing together can also be great for your whole family! It can help build stronger relationships while your child is learning and having lots of fun.

Offer Support

You can set your child up for success in learning through play by offering support during challenging situations, such as difficulty joining in with groups.

Navigate these challenges together by intervening only when necessary, discussing your child’s feelings, and providing strategies to approach situations differently in the future, such as offering to share with others.

Follow Their Lead

When it comes to making learning through play a positive experience, it’s important not to push your child into activities they may not feel ready for.

For example, if you’ve noticed your child isn’t taking an interest in playing with other children just yet, that’s OK! They will begin to observe and eventually participate in activities with others when they feel ready.

It’s equally as important to let your child make their own decisions when it comes to the type of play activities they want to engage in. If your child enjoys exploring more than they enjoy fantasy play, let them explore.

Also, remember that children’s interests change. For instance, today, they may take an interest in painting and want to do it the whole day. Then, next weekend, they may be done with painting and want to build a fort underneath the coffee table.

So, don’t worry too much if your young learner isn’t showing interest in particular activities. The interest can develop over time. In the meantime, give them the freedom to explore what they love right now.

Give Your Child A Dedicated Space

Children know how to make a freshly cleaned room look like a tornado just hit it! As a parent, it can be frustrating to let your child continue playing and having fun while watching your home being turned upside down.

To help, designate a specific room or space (e.g., a corner in the living room or outside) for your child to play in. Then, let them play and explore whatever activities they wish within that space. They can draw, do a puzzle, dress up, or even build that fort!

Having a play environment or a dedicated space where your child is free to use their imagination is a great way for them to learn and develop new skill sets.

Learn Through Play With HOMER

Learning through play is an important part of your child’s skill development and can encourage creativity and imagination as well as learning.

By implementing the play ideas above — from language play to fantasy play and everything in-between — your child will be having so much fun they won’t even realize they’re learning valuable lessons along the way!

The Learn with Sesame Street app is an effective tool that helps kids learn and develop their social and emotional skills. With the help of their Sesame Street friends, kids learn how to express their emotions, empathize with others, and create healthy relationships. Explore the Learn with Sesame Street app today!

Happy playing!

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The Benefits of Learning Through Play + The 16 Best Activities for Learning

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Play is much more than just having fun! In fact, renowned psychologist, Jean Piaget said “play is the work of childhood. ”

Lev Vygotsky, another psychologist, said “In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behaviour; in play, it’s as though he were a head taller than himself.”

Not only is play fun and an effective way to learn, but it also helps to build self-confidence. Play is essential and it is how children learn.

How does play affect learning? Play is crucial to building towards a child’s later academic learning.

Pushing them in early academic pursuits, such as learning letter names and sounds, reading, and completing mathematical pencil and paper problems, does not “speed up” their progress.

So much stress has been placed on early academic learning in recent years that more people in the early childhood field are beginning to speak out against the negative effects of pushing early academics, in an attempt to defend play.

Why is Learning Through Play Important?

While children can still learn through direct instruction and observation, the strongest connections to concepts are formed when children “discover” and make sense of the world on their own through hands-on experiences.

What better way to learn than through play, which is a natural form of exploration?

Learning through play also has many other positive outcomes. Play is typically an active and joyful experience, which lends itself to social interaction between children and between adults and children.

In addition, play is iterative, in that the concepts learned then build upon themselves, leading to even deeper knowledge and understanding.

8 Benefits of Learning Through Play

What are the benefits of play in child development? The act of play offers a wide variety of benefits to children. Some of these outcomes are physical skills, while others are cognitive competencies.

The following eight categories are skill areas that show the benefits of play-based learning.

1. Fine Motor

Play that involves holding small tools, grasping utensils, and using fingers helps to develop fine motor skills. This involves things like scissors, crayons, paintbrushes, Legos, and playdough.

2. Gross Motor

Whole-body movements are involved in gross motor development. Large muscles are engaged during activities like skipping, jumping, running, tumbling, climbing, and riding bikes.

3. Language

For language development, vocabulary growth and effective communication, children must be able to use symbols for representing reality.

In play, children use objects to represent real-life things, which then carries over into using words to represent those same types of things.

Play involves oral communication, singing songs, and reciting rhymes, which all aid in language development.

4. Social

What are the social benefits of play? Experiences in play offer ample opportunity for children to learn social skills and social rules or norms of behaviour.

They communicate with others, verbally and non-verbally. Kids also practise social concepts during their play such as sharing, taking turns, empathy, teamwork, and compromise.

5. Emotional

Play takes care of many of children’s emotional needs.

It gives them the opportunity to express positive emotions through laughing and smiling. Active play is helpful for children to reduce stress, raise mood, and induce sensations of achievement and high self-esteem.

Through play, children can also work through scary or challenging situations in their lives or from their imaginations.

6. Problem Solving

In their play, children build upon concepts they have previously learned. These concepts may involve planning, cause and effect relationships, and how to move or manipulate various types of objects.

They look at what works and what does not, then try different ways to accomplish their goals and solve challenging problems.

7. Creativity

Pretend play offers children an outlet for their imaginations. They can learn about the world through role-playing and creating imaginary worlds.

Play encourages divergent thinking or coming up with creative ways of tackling issues and exploring various solutions.

8. Maths

Research suggests a connection between block play for kids and mathematical aptitude in later years.

Complex block play encourages thinking, planning, problem solving, and concentrating, which are skills often observed in children who go on to excel in maths.

Therefore, this type of play is thought to affect cognitive development.

The 16 Best Learning Through Play Activities

The following examples of learning through play encourage children to explore their world, build upon prior learning, and reap many of the benefits outlined above.

Sandplay

Taking place indoors or outside with various tools, sandplay offers growth in many skills, such as measurement, science, and one-to-one correspondence.

Use a sand table, a smaller container of sand, a sandbox, or a trip to the beach.

Water Play

Like sand, water play can occur inside or outdoors, employing an assortment of tools and offering practice for gross and small motor skills.

Try a water table, tub, kitchen sink, swimming pool (large or small), puddles, and a trip to the lake or ocean.

Construction

Kids can build with a wide range of materials and toys, such as blocks, play logs, tiles, train sets, marble runs, and a variety of plastic and wooden construction sets. Cardboard sheets, boxes, paper, egg cartons, and the like, also work well with tape.

Children practise pre-maths skills, problem solving, concentration, and patience.

Learn more about the benefits of construction play and how to encourage it in your own home.

Playdough/Clay

Make your own playdough with your children’s help or purchase some at the store. It increases fine motor skills, creativity, concentration, and science understanding.

As a bonus, kneading playdough and clay offers therapeutic effects, such as relaxation and stress reduction.

Movement

Fine motor and gross motor skills can be developed with movement activities, along with cognitive function and overall health.

Do these indoors or out, depending on the specific choices. Outdoors, try hopscotch, obstacle courses, and tag. Indoors, you may lead the kids in yoga, Simon Says, and “tight-rope walking,” using string or yarn.

Outdoor Play/Nature Exploration

Scavenger hunts are a fun outdoor activity, which can be geared towards nature items, if you wish. Nature hikes are another fun way to stimulate imagination and learn about science during play.

In parks and at schools, playground equipment offers safe ways for children to use those large muscles. Jump rope, Red Rover, and climbing trees remain childhood favourites.

Drama

Kids love to play dress-up, and with drama they can pretend to be various characters. Add different types of household props, like kitchen items, for more make-believe fun.

Emotional, social, and cognitive learning can all take centre stage.

Music

Provide real instruments, those made especially for children, or old pans to beat on with wooden spoons! Of course, they can sing songs and recite rhymes along with the beat and tunes.

Music is helpful for language learning, auditory perception, and pre-maths skills related to patterns.

Art

Open-ended art play with no set “product” directed is preferred for cognitive development. Supply crayons, pencils, markers, paints, various types of paper, glue and tape.

Art is important for fine motor skills, visual perception, pre-writing skills, and of course, creativity.

Listening to Stories

Listening is an important strength for kids, and attending to stories and books being told or read to them is good practice for this skill.

Thoughtful choices can also be very calming for children. Keep stories short and high interest for the best results.

Some children like to hear the same ones, over and over, which is fine since memorization is also an important cognitive skill.

Puppets

Purchase or make puppets with your kids from socks, paper plates, paper sacks, and cut fabric. Puppet play enhances language development, social skills, planning, and creativity.

Simple Group Games

Easy group games like Broken Telephone, Simon Says, I Spy, and various memory or clapping games can be played indoors or outside.

Kids practise social skills and gain cognitive abilities, as well.

Table-Top Toys

Small table-top toys are great to encourage fine motor development. Try strung beads or macaroni, linking toys, lacing cards/shoes, small Legos, puzzles, and small objects picked up with clothespins or tweezers.

Cooking

Pretend cooking with pans, spoons and dry macaroni is one option. Safely helping Mom or Dad in the kitchen with real cooking is another possibility.

These cooking activities can reinforce pre-maths skills, language development and self-esteem.

Symbolic Play

Symbolic or pretend play is where objects and toys are used in place of other things. You can model this for your children, showing how an empty cereal box transforms into a boat for small figurines, for example.

If children have access to toys and common household objects (like empty toilet paper rolls), they should have what they need to take part in symbolic play. This is important for cognitive development, motor skills, and creativity.

Free Play

Free play can take place outdoors and inside. It is not a “free-for-all” or wild, dangerous play. Free play just means that children initiate the play and are free to make choices from among the available options.

Those options could involve any of the activities explained above. This type of play is important for social and emotional development, problem solving and cognitive development.

For any of these 16 categories of play activities, you can surely come up with additional ideas and favourites for your children.

Variety is a wonderful thing; however, depending on their stages of development and personal traits, some children may ask for or choose the same types of activities for rather long periods of time.

Not to worry. Most children are eventually happy to move on if you make sure many options are available to them.

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Game learning - Tutors Association Blog

Game is not only fun for children or a way to have a good time. With its help, you can also learn something new, master science, memorize complex concepts. Playful learning makes learning easier not only for toddlers, but also for high school students and even adults. And most importantly, using the game as a teaching method is not difficult and realistic at home.

A bit about learning through games

Learning is much easier and more enjoyable in the game. Photo source

Interestingly, the game has been used as a learning element since ancient times. For example, in ancient Greece, these were sports competitions, competitions in music, literature and the ability to argue. Competitions, discussions and some other elements of game learning have been and are used in almost every educational institution from ancient times to the present day.

However, game learning as a separate method emerged quite recently - in the second half of the 20th century. Today it is developing rapidly, but so far it is not used everywhere. But if your child's educational institution does not use game teaching methods or is used to a limited extent, this does not mean at all that you cannot use them on your own. The game can significantly facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge and skills for a child of any age and even an adult, increase interest in learning. In contrast to the traditional form of learning, gaming has the following advantages:

1. Light and interesting shape. The game has an exciting, understandable and attractive format for everyone. There is no strict discipline, and participants have more freedom of action than in alternative learning situations.
2. Increased participant activation. It is easier to get interested in a game, it is easier to attract participants to it and it is easier to get the desired result from them. After all, emotional, mental, physical and other resources are involved in its process. nine0020
3. Additional motivation. With the help of the game format, you can not only teach, but also motivate to study, as well as get the child to show initiative, perseverance, creativity and purposefulness.
4. Ease of transfer and assimilation of knowledge. A feature of the game is the fact that participants must enter it voluntarily. Due to this, the influence of psychological defenses that prevent understanding and accepting new information, mastering new skills and abilities is reduced. nine0020
5. Versatile. The game is a great way to explain what is not very clear, give new information, teach something, as well as entertain yourself and the child, learn to interact, unlock potential, etc.

When studying with your child or trying to learn something on your own, feel free to translate learning into a game format. To do this, it is important to take into account age and show a lot of interest and a little creativity.

Play-based learning for preschoolers

At preschool age, play is the main form of activity. The child plays in the kindergarten with other children and the teacher, at home with his parents and on his own. And in the course of this game it is very easy to teach the kid the basic concepts (for example, colors, shapes, numbers, letters) and prepare him for school.

Educational games for preschoolers can be very diverse. It all depends on the imagination and desires of the parents, on the specific knowledge that you want to give to the child. Here are some ideas and tips:

• For very young children (from 1.5-2 years old) it is advisable to combine the usual game with the presentation of new information. For example, when assembling a pyramid, stacking cubes, rolling cars, etc., you can name the child the colors of the elements, their shape, and number them. It is important that such games and naming be systematic. In this case, the child will remember the new information quite quickly.
• Educational toys. Recently, children's stores have a large number of such toys, designed for a certain age. For children, they are very useful, as they allow the development of various skills (fine motor skills, size discrimination, etc.) and attractive, as they are developed taking into account child psychology and age characteristics. nine0020
• For older preschoolers (from approx. 5 years old) a "growth scale" can be introduced. On this scale, the child will independently mark his successes and achievements, gradually moving up like a ladder. For example, a scale related to the study of the alphabet may have the following division steps: familiarity with letters, partial reproduction of the alphabet, complete reproduction of the alphabet, vowels, consonants, etc. The child can move along this scale some figure that symbolizes him. It’s good if the baby will receive a pleasant reinforcement for reaching a new level - a candy, a small toy, or just praise. nine0020
• It is easy to learn the rules of the road while playing, to acquaint the child with professions and their content. Various thematic sets, picture books, large-scale pictures depicting a road with crossroads and road signs, etc. will help with this. To do this, it is enough to explain to the child during the game what a particular sign means, what a representative of a particular profession does.
• Voluntary memorization is not yet sufficiently developed in preschool children. nine0006 If you want the child to remember something, then present it in a playful way. For example, a baby will remember a list of some products very well and easily if you ask him to imagine that he is going to the store and these products need to be bought.