|
Play helps children to develop important concepts. Through play activities, a child learns the meaning of up and down, hard and soft, and big and small. Play contributes to a child’s knowledge of building things and arranging things in sets. Children learn to sort, to classify, and to probe for answers.
Piaget (1962) feels that imaginative play is one of the purest forms of symbolic thought available to the young child. According to Piaget, it permits the child to fit the reality of the world into her own interest and knowledge of the world. Thus, imaginative play contributes strongly to the child’s intellectual development. Play also offers the opportunities to acquire information that sets the foundation for additional learning.
Ex: Through playing with blocks a child learns the idea of equivalents.
A child gains an understanding of her environment as she investigates stones, grass, flowers, earth, water and anything else around her. Through these experiences, she eventually begins to make her own generalizations: Adding water to earth makes mud. As child plays, she develops spatial concepts, as she climbs in, over and around the big box in the yard. She clarifies concepts of ‘in’, ‘over’ and ‘around’. In the sandbox, words such as ‘deep’, ‘deeper’ and ‘deepest’ begin to have meaning.
Importance of play for Cognitive Development
|
Participants