As the saying goes, "Play is the work of a child". It is through play when our children learn about the world around them.
For parents, understanding the different types of play would help us better guide and structure our children's playtime, enabling more meaningful play for our children.
Thrivine's toys and curated learning resources will largely be based off the 4 key types of play -
1. Exploratory Play
Here's when a child learns about a subject as she observes and fiddles with an object while learning about its texture, shape, size. Parental prompts at this point can help reinforce children's understandings of a topic - and offers opportunities for introduction of new concepts and vocabulary.
2. Pretend Play
Also known as imaginative play, here's when a child invokes her imagination as she uses objects to represent an idea or scenario. Hence, spurring children's creativity, social emotional skills. Small world play and sensory bin set up offers opportunities for pretend play.
3. Constructive Play
Play that involves building, creation ie. Block tower, craft etc. Such play promotes cognitive skills development as a child learns to problem-solve.
4. Functional Play
Functional play is more experiential and sensory.based - it could be playing on the see-saw, slide or putting squeezing a rattle toy. Children develop motor skills and social emotional skills.
Now that you are aware of the different play types of children and their benefits, what are you supposed to act on?
While play is natural, structured and meaningful play is not that intuitive for parents all the time.
Like alot of you out there, I engage my child spontaneously but without a structured guide and efforts in putting together a materials, I tend to lose focus on any learning goals.
Our upcoming learning resources seek to address this issue of busy parents and will provide thematic guidance for parents so that you will be able to better facilitate your children's learning and keep them meaningfully occupied.
Follow us on Instagram @thrivinekids as we announce the launch of our store and resource guide!
