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Play and Learn Together
09-03-2011
 

Every child likes playing. Games can strengthen children’s body, inspire thinking and acquire social skills. In order to reach these objectives, parents need to have more understanding about playing so as to facilitate development and learning of children.

Every child has his own style to play. Parents should not limit a child to  play in a toy in a particular way. Also, playing is just playing, it is not appropriate to impose too much training on a game or turn it to be a reward or punishment tools. The experience of playing a game should be happy and interesting. Once a child is reluctant to play a game, do not force him/her to play it as self motivation of playing is the most important.   

Benefits of Playing

  1. Facilitate the development of different parts of body: Through playing some physically demanding game, such as cycling, they can strengthen the coordination of body and muscles of children.
  2. Ventilate emotion and express feeling: Children need to ventilate and release their feeling and emotion as adults do. Through role play and self talks with puppets, children can release and ventilate their feeling which is beneficial to their emotion.
  3. Enhance social skills: When a child is playing with other children, he or she has to acquire social skills of how to get alone with other children. In the process, a child can learn a lot of social skills, such as how to observe rules, cooperation and sharing.  

4. Inspire thinking: Children can experience and practice a lot of things when they are playing with their imagination. It will be beneficial to thinking.  

How to play with children?

  1. Child is the most key person in playing a game, parents are participants. So, let your children be active and lead the game. It can help inspire their creativity.
  2. More praises and less criticism, children feels happy and enjoy games more.
  3. Parents should pay attention to the behavior and performance of their children when they are playing. Parents should also be committed to playing game with their children. It can enhance closer parents child relationship  
  4. Through playing games, parents can stimulate language development by giving more description of the actions of children and what is going to happen.
  5. Some children have better language ability, parents can join role play or encourage children to speak story to them, it can facilitate their imagination and communication.   

How to choose toy for children?

  1. Toys should be chosen according to the ability and development of children: Parents can try to understand the development of children before they choose toys. Children may lose interest if toys are too hard or too easy to play.
  2. Choose toys with educational purpose: Parents can choose toys which are useful to train cognition, intelligence, languages and creativity of children. For example, bricks can train the flexibility of fine motor of fingers while cooking role play can train the creativity of children.
  3. Price of toys is not important: Expensive toys do not necessarily meaningful for children development. As the interest of children varies quickly, parents should buy toys that they can afford.
 
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