Posts about PLAY and it’s importance to children, including all indoor and outdoor play, arts ,crafts, creative and imaginative play.
Children learn by imitating. A baby’s first smile mirrors another’s grin; the first babbles mimic a parent’s speech. It’s therefore hardly surprising that the earliest role play children act outcomes from familiar domestic scenes. Examples include chatting away into a toy phone or cooking up a storm with plastic food and making mud pies. They
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We all know the importance of maintaining a child’s self-esteem. How a positive self-image and confidence impacts on learning. That children with high self-esteem generally feel loved, competent, happy and are therefore productive. If children acquire this self-esteem as a result of successful experiences, surely play opportunities are ideal for building success? How does child-led play
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Role play gets your jobs done! Never is there an easier way to get young children helping with jobs than to get them into a role. Get them fully engaged in imaginative play and before you know it the ‘characters’ have dusted, organised, baked, written, vacuumed, weeded… Just imagine what you could do with your
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How has something instinctive become a right we have to knowingly make time for? Circumstance should not decide kids’ right to play, feel safe and explore the world. Every child has the right to play. Through play, we learn. I don’t mean giving a child a set of brightly coloured objects and telling them the
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“Flipping the classroom” Some years ago in my school, we trialled ‘flipping the classroom’. We wanted it to be child-led learning. To move away from the model of a teacher at the front of the room telling children what and how they would be learning. Introducing enquiry based learning by starting with a ‘big question’
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The fact that children need to play is truly universal and goes to the heart of society’s success and failure. The Telegraph published an article in 2013, Children as young as five suffering from depression. In the same article the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) said that 8,000 children below the age of 10
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