Carol Stovold Quality Kidz www.qualitykidz.co.nz

How many times have you heard the expression, ‘Oh they're just playing?' Maybe you've said it yourself.

The amazing thing is that while it often seems that all children do is play - for the child, play takes on a very different meaning. Play to a child IS learning. They learn to play and play to learn. Play is terribly important to a child. It is not a distraction. It's not something they do to take up time. It's the child's life.

As adults we often think that children ‘play' until they are five or six, then they go off to school and start to ‘learn'. They play until they are big enough to really begin to do things - or so it seems to grown-ups. But what do we really know about their play and how do we know they are learning anything? Let's look at the vital role of play in learning.

At birth, the infants are pioneers setting forth to explore a very new and very strange place. They do not know how the world works. They do not know that when you drop something it goes down, that balls roll, or that things faraway look smaller than they really are. Infants are born beginners in life. They have to set about learning everything. And learning everything about everything.

Not only do newborns not know these worldly things, they don't know that they can learn to do the things they need to do to get along in the world. They don't know they can learn to turn over, sit up, walk, feed themselves, dress themselves, ride a bike, be a friend, or even talk. But they do learn all these things - and they learn them in the four or five years before they go to school.

We know young children acquire more practical knowledge during the early years than at any other time in life. In these early years, young children are finding out what the world is like. They are exploring their abilities to cope with it.

Young children set out to meet their needs, to explore and do. At birth, their five senses are working. At first they have little muscular control over their bodies. By the end of the first year they have begun to coordinate the use of their eyes and hands and will soon be able to go everywhere on their own two feet.

Young children are curious, and that curiosity is never satisfied. They throw themselves into the business of learning. Through their experiences with things, they learn the nature of common materials. They work at doing simple things. They try out and try on much of what they see and hear in make-believe play. They make learning a part of themselves.

By the time children are five or so years old, if all has gone well, they are on first-person, first-hand terms with their immediate surroundings. They know what common things are like, what they will do, and what they can do with them. They have learned these lessons in the best possible way - through play.

To find out more about learning through play talk to Quality Kidz today on 07 574 4333 or visit www.qualitykidz.co.nz

Next week – More on the vital role of play in learning.