Little Learners, Big Discoveries: Play as the pathway to cognitive growth

Play is a very significant yet frequently overlooked factor in children’s learning in the early years stage. However, as much as people consider it as mere frolicking around in infancy and engaging in futile exercises that have no clear objectives, play is an essential component of learning especially among preschool children. This may characteristically appear to be a space of leisure that is in truth a critical developmental phase where many of the core competencies are developed.

Ms Komal Nathani, School Head, Apeejay Rhythms Kinderworld, GK-II, play builds on your child’s curiosity and allows them to experiment, question, discover, and problem-solve.

“When children are playing they are trying new things, taking safe risks, and trusting their decisions. Research has shown that play benefits children in a large variety of ways. It aids in language development, social interactions, creativity, thinking skills, motor abilities, general intelligence, and even brain growth. Diane Ackerman (an American poet, and essayist) has rightly said that play is our brain’s favourite way of learning. It is the foundation of learning, creativity, self-expression, and constructive problem-solving. It’s how children wrestle with life to make it meaningful,” Ms Nathani stated.

Creativity starts from such an area called the domain of rough and tumble play where rules are few and the main factor is independent thinking. For instance, a plain box made of cardboard can transform into a spaceship, a fortress, or even a stealthy race car within the blink of an eye due to the flexibility of the child. It is important to stress that such transformations are not only playful, though they stimulate exploration and innovative learning experiences; they also foster the prerequisites of elaborate mentation.

Problem-Solving

Let’s take an example of children playing together and setting up a game to build a fort using blocks. The task is not simply in putting one block on top of another but it takes several decisions about how to build a structure, how to balance the load and at the same time think about the look of it. All options are issued as the problem-solving assignment based on the crucial role of the decision-making activity for their analytical and reasoning abilities.

Language Development Amidst Play

One particular hard-and-fast rule of learning – and a very strong one at that – is that still sharper and better language skills are obtained during play. Another beneficial aspect of game-based learning is that during role-playing, children not only master language features but also understand and use semantic and syntactic relations, and analyse texts with the aid of identifying sequential, temporal, cause/effect, and other logical and narrative relations. For instance, when children are given a game where they are to take roles or when they are told to explain the rules of a game in a make-believe game, it is educative in that it exposes the children to new forms of expressions and probably different words.

Executive Functions and Play

A structured game involves the integration of enhanced memory strategies to facilitate proper memory patterns in the brain. This is because play, including organisation, sustained attention, and the ability to control one’s behavior, is largely associated with the development of executive functions.

Guided Play

You can only be truly free if you are also getting direction. Free play where the teacher provides the environment and mainly watches the children at play is a perfect example of free play and learning whereby educators provide a platform, but the children can choose how they wish to engage in play. It creates the atmosphere of discovery and the idea of ‘Do This and Find Out’ is very important for cognitive development.

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