Children’s play is not something that happens by chance. It is also not intended to occupy their free time. It is part of every child and occurs in all children in the world. Playing is of vital importance for children, because through playing the child discovers the world around him and gains insight into events and situations. He will experience the world in the most literal sense of the word.
What is the point of playing
By playing I mean: acquiring skills. Playing is important for the personal development of the child. It is the basis for later techniques that the child will use to learn to read, calculate and gain insight into all kinds of matters. If a child does not learn to play, this will have consequences for his later school performance, but also for the child’s personality and behavior. Children hear, see and feel with their hands as they play. Whether it is drawing lines with a pencil on a drawing paper or making funny faces in front of the mirror or climbing a tree: H it is an active confrontation with their environment. Children want to discover with their bodies how their environment works. There are no fixed patterns, habits or routine for children yet. Their world consists of being constantly confronted with new opportunities, which they are more than happy to take on.
If all goes well, a child plays about 6 to 8 hours a day. Children are challenged by the environment: they see a chair and want to climb on it, they see a flower and want to feel it, seeing is touching and doing something with it. They try and discover that one thing goes well and the other takes more effort. They enjoy the action and can perform the same action for a long time: climbing onto the box again and again and falling off again. By doing, the child learns the laws of physics with the whole body. It gains insight into things around it and into its own capabilities. Children are very intense in their play and thus take in the world with all its possibilities and boundaries.
Development through play
Through play the child develops in the following areas:
- Emotional development. Through play the child gains all kinds of experiences and processes emotions. He learns to process disappointments by performing the action over and over again. He develops endurance and is satisfied when an action taken succeeds after a number of tries.
- Motor development. Through playing, the child develops a quick response to events, the relationship between seeing and doing, and eye-hand coordination continues to improve. Gross and fine motor skills develop through playing.
- Cognitive development. Through play, a child learns to think logically, concentrate better, remember actions, acquire a larger vocabulary and learn to use language in a more nuanced manner. Through playing, children learn precisely those skills that are necessary to tackle new situations independently and with their own sense of responsibility. It is amazing that children’s play prepares them for the necessary learning. By playing they have already developed skills that are needed for school.
Playing is learning
As long as learning is still seen as an accumulation of knowledge, there is also the prejudice that learning is only the product of the right way of presenting knowledge. A child’s knowledge is then assessed based on the number of books the child has read or the progress made in arithmetic. In the first years of primary school, a lot of work is done with material that challenges the child to get to work with it, to discover how the material works. There are many types of games that are used to allow the child to discover themselves and at the same time learn to work together with other children. Building materials, doll corner, paper, drawing materials, strategy games, role play and outdoor play materials. Children, encouraged by the leadership, can use everything they have to expand their knowledge of the world. In this way, two worlds come together: their inner emotional world and the outside world in which they live. Children do not immediately need the best learning programs, but the opportunity to expand the skills they already have through play. It is necessary for a child to experience new things and to master them, just as he also mastered climbing on a bench through trial and error and trying again. This way the child continues to enjoy learning and remains curious about the next step. The Swiss psychologist Piaget wondered: Why do we teach children so much that they cannot discover and experience for themselves?
How many children feel trapped in the school system and come into their own with special projects such as: forest treasure hunts, building (tree) houses, treasure hunting, sawing and carpentry. Then they play real life, feel like the great explorer and are, without knowing it, working on their cognitive development.