What is Play-Based Learning?
A child’s learning is not only from education, it can be gained from playing. At an early age, children need to explore and develop their physical and mental growth. Learning and exploration while playing have long-lasting impacts on child growth development and nature.
Play-based learning is a playful environment provided to children for their better growth, developing creative skills and confidence and learning new things. This learning is provided in educational institutions, playgrounds, and homes with both indoor and outdoor games and activities.
Benefits of Play-Based Learning For Childhood Growth
Play-based learning has multifaceted benefits in children’s growth and development, here some of them:
1. Nurture Creativity and Imagination
Play-based learning is one of the core roles in nurturing the creativity and imagination of children. While playing, the child is free to learn and explore their world through their imagination and vision. It allows a child to do experiments through color drawings, toys, games, or interacting with other children.
Play-based learning fosters and nourishes the learning capability and creativity of children and gives them a broad vision to see the world by playing and doing different activities. It develops the creative skills of learning new things and enhances the imagination of children.
2. Learn Social Skills and Emotional Development
Play-based learning also offers a better platform and a social environment for a child to learn social skills and how to build up relations with other children. It encourages them to share their emotions with their peers. These playful activities with other peers helps them develop emotional relationships and connections with each other.
Children form many friendships while playing group activities and they also get to know value and empathy for each other. They learn better social skills to make new friendships through play-based learning. This kind of early friendship develops understanding and empathy in child development that shapes their personality for adulthood.
3. Language Development
Play is very crucial in learning better communication and language development in children. The playing activities such as storytelling, interactive and pretend play games or word games organize and enhance the language and communication skills in children.
It gives them a natural platform to learn new words from other peers and shapes words that they experience while playing. Through storytelling, new words have been added to children’s vocabulary. Also, reading playful learning books with pictures and letters can improve their oral expressions and expand their language.
4. Enhance Cognitive Development
Play-based learning encourages children to figure out things and think critically and logically. Puzzle-solving, building toys, arts and crafts, word games, crossing the words, drawing, and painting-like plays boost critical learning and thinking of children.
This play-based learning builds their confidence to solve problems and also develop ideas and concepts. This makes their mind sharp and flourishes their intellectual growth. Especially plays like puzzle solving, measuring objects, and building blocks help to understand scientific concepts.
5. Self Discovery and Independence
Play-based learning encourages kids to explore themselves by finding their interests, likenesses, capabilities and nourishes their personality. It fosters self-awareness and self-discovery in the children and creates a sense of trust and belief in them.
Plays make them responsible for solving their problems on their own and making decisions independently. It also teaches them to know their strengths and weaknesses and how to overcome the challenges and set goals. In play-based learning, children learn to take failure as a learning process and even after so many failures and getting hurt in play, they keep playing.
