This famous quote by author Diane Ackerman highlights that play is crucial for cognitive development, stimulating creativity, critical thinking, and social skills.
How does the Brain Work?
The brain is made of neural networks where connections are made to retain information and remade when new information is fed in. Recalling information is important and a specific cue can activate part of a network, allowing the brain to reconstruct the entire memory. So it is important that young minds are fed byte sized information albeit consistently and at intervals.
What better way to learn than play?
Uninterrupted, child-led play is the most effective way to foster this, encouraging deeper exploration of interests and concepts.
Children could be made to trace numbers 1 through 10 in a book and still fail to remember what a ‘3’ looks like. However, during play led learning our education practitioners would play number blocks with our Bloomers enabling them to touch and feel what a number ‘3’ looks like and pick it up among blocks of other numbers. Over time our education practitioners would use these blocks in art and craft activities or while picking up leaves from the garden. Eventually when Bloomers are encouraged to put pencil to paper and learn to trace numbers they already have a memory associated with number ‘3’ which may be picking 3 leaves or coloring 3 ants. In addition, art and craft and outdoor play would have helped hone their motor skills allowing them better pencil control to trace numbers on their book.
Making Lasting Memories.
The memories a child makes during play becomes coded deep in their subconscious which signals to them that learning is fun and natural. They learn that learning happens in a classroom and during everyday activities. The brain now has an emotion registered to learning and is no longer simply a tedious action. This is the ultimate goal of play based learning.
We at Kiddies Zone pay attention to well curated lesson plans where an activity is designed for the child to be excited about coming to school to play. However, the activity would have elements of creativity, social and emotional intelligence, current events, literacy or arithmetics, and physical development that the child would imbibe without even realising. This takes a lot of effort and creativity on the part of our education practitioners to whom we are always grateful. Together we will build future ready children!!
Stay tuned for more on play based learning happening at Kiddies Zone.