In today’s learning environment of No Child Left Behind legislation, emphasis on pre-academics and academics has reduced children’s play time even in preschools and kindergarten.  Play is the work of children!  Many educators and school districts have lost sight of the importance of play and the skills that a child learns while engaging in all forms of play.

Let’s imagine standing just inside the doorway of a typical preschool classroom.  To the right, a group of children are playing with cars and trucks.  Across the room a little girl has just taken a tub of Legos from the shelf.  Nearby, two boys argue over the possession of some playdough before settling in to make pretend birthday cakes.  And to the left, a group is gathered around the indoor sand table, digging and pouring.  It all looks like fun, but will it help them get ready for kindergarten and elementary school?      The answer is yes.

The connection between play and later school success is strong, but often under underestimated.  It’s often easier to see how play supports physical or social-emotional development than how it builds a foundation for academic skills, but it does.

Let’s consider a few examples:

Cars and Trucks

• Figure-Ground Discrimination—the ability to pick out and concentrate on one item and separate it from the background.  Arranging cars on a play mat in preschool, for example, builds a foundation for later being able to see a letter as a part of a word—or the word as a meaningful part of a sentence.
• Visual Tracking—the ability to follow the movement of an object with one’s eyes and guide it with one’s hand.  Practice in driving a toy truck along a road made of blocks helps develop the coordination needed in elementary school for guiding a pencil along a piece of lined paper.
• Grouping—the ability to figure out what characteristics several objects have in common.  A child who sorts through all the vehicles, searching for metal racing cars rather than, say, plastic or wooden ones is preparing for mathematical set theory.  The same is true for the child who sorts through blocks and separates them by color or shape.

Shelf Toys  (Legos, Beads, Pegboards, etc.)

• Seriation—the ability to determine what comes next in a series. A preschool creating a predictable sequence with blocks or beads is practicing a valuable math skill needed for understanding number patterns.
• Constancy—the ability to understand that a particular characteristic such as color or shape stays the same, even when other characteristics change.  A child stringing beads soon discovers that round beads are always round no matter what their color or size.  That paves the way for understanding the “A”, “a”, and “a” are all the same letter.
•  Control of muscles in fingertips.  Toys that must be fitted together, arranged, put together and taken apart offer opportunities for strengthening and developing the muscles that will eventually be used for writing and printing in kindergarten and elementary school.

Play Dough

• Matching—the ability to recognize how things correspond.  A child who cuts a playdough shape with a cookie cutter and fits the shape back into the corresponding space is practicing a prereading skill that will enable him to discriminate differences and similarities among letters.
• Part to Whole Relationships—the ability to understand that a number of small pieces can make up a larger one.  A sentence is made up of different words just as pretend birthday cake might be composed of different pieces—playdough, small sticks and perhaps a toy plate.  What’s more, an understanding of how parts compose a whole is fundamental to addition and subtraction.
• Representation—the ability to see that one object can stand for or symbolize another.  Knowing that a piece of playdough can represent a piece of pizza helps develop the idea that letters on a page can also represent real life.

It all sounds pretty serious, and that’s for a good reason:  Play is a young child’s most critical pathway to learning.  So, if your child’s nursery school, preschool or kindergarten  provides plenty of time, materials, and support for play, you can relax.  They understand how young children learn and mature in all areas of development.                                                                    (With excerpts from The Well-Centered Child)

For more information contact Children Unlimited, at children@fcgnetworks.net