- Play provides the opportunity for children to practice new skills and functions. As they master these activities, they can integrate or recognize them into other task-oriented sequences.
- Play offers numerous opportunities for children to act on objects and experience events. It gives children a wide spectrum of experiences. Ex. field trip, each friendship built with children and adults including some from different cultures.
- Play is an active form of learning that unites the mind, body and spirit.
- Play enables children to transform reality into symbolic representations of the world. Ex: Children may be bowling and decide to keep count of how many pins each knocks down.
- Through play children can consolidate previous learning.
- As they play, children can retain their playful attitude. Learning through play stimulates flexibility in problem solving. Children are open to a variety of solutions. They are amazingly inventive in solving problems.
- Creativity and aesthetic appreciation are developed through play. When children see how difficult it is to work with clay, they can appreciate the efforts involved in sculpture and pottery.
- Play enables children to learn about things through curiosity, invention, persistence and lot of other factors. Children’s attention spans are amazingly long when they are interested.
- Play produces the pressure or tension that otherwise is associated with achievement or learning. Adults do not interfere, and let the children relax. Play provides a minimum of risks and penalties for mistakes.
In the art programme they learn many important concepts that are used later in other learning experiences (color concept/concept of change etc.). Art activities involve children in sensorimotor learning through the use of the body, sense and mind. ‘Learning by doing” in art helps a child grow mentally, as he grows more flexible in his thinking. The child learns to think of things in the context of change and that not all things are permanent. The ability to think in this way is called flexible thinking.
Involving all the senses in the art activities help to provide a complete learning experience for young children. Including appropriate experiences for young children’s sensorimotor learning is not really that difficult to do in the daily schedule. Children learn important concepts such as hard/soft, same/ different, by doing art work. Art work also helps in developing their mental abilities, learning to think flexibly, being able to see fine differences, being able to hear, listen, follow directions and learning new words.
Learning to see things as clearly as possible according to Piaget, is an aid to child’s mental growth. Good observational skills that will be used in academic subjects like science, mathematics and reading. A child’s vocabulary can grow through working with different materials. Ex: soft and smooth touch of velvet material.
Mastering opposite concepts used in doing artwork helps the child learn the mental concepts needed in other school subjects. The early childhood art program helps a young child grow in social, emotional, physical and mental ways. It gives a chance to grow themselves at individual paces. Art helps a child grow through creative thinking and feeling not only about all other things. Thus, art helps to develop creative mental attitude that will help in all school subjects. The creative aspects of art should not be separated from total early childhood programme.
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