Play is essential for young children, including when it comes to their learning. Prioritizing play offers a variety of benefits for children, from helping them grow their vocabulary to managing their big feelings with fewer behavioral problems. Play also benefits children’s cognitive and social and emotional development.

Benefits of Play-Based Learning

Research has shown that play-based learning can improve children’s social and emotional skills, help them process or understand the world around them, and even improve their math understanding. For example, block play can support children’s cognitive development and mathematical understanding. As children plan, test, and revise their block structures, they learn critical thinking and develop an understanding of spatial relationships.

Longitudinal research shows that playing with blocks during the early childhood years predicts higher achievement in math in middle school and high school. Additionally, guided play, meaning an adult asking open-ended questions to help fuel a child’s play, has been found to be more beneficial for children’s math understanding than direct instruction.

Types of Play

There are different types of play, including dramatic, or pretend, play. Dramatic play can improve children’s emotion regulation, fuel their language development, and help children work through anxiety, aggression, and fear. Constructive play, meanwhile, generally describes children building or creating things, such as blocks or art.

Play-based learning involves a more structured activity or game with a particular outcome or goal. For example, a child could be playing with buttons and then be asked to sort them by size, shape, or color. Adults can serve an important role in children’s exploration by joining in occasionally to ask thoughtful questions, introducing new vocabulary or characters, sparking ideas, or helping children work through conflicts.

Original reporting: KTVZ (Central Oregon) — read the source article.