Children learn and develop a range of skills through play so that, by the age of five, they will have acquired many basic skills. Kathy Galashan looks at ways in which you can encourage your children to play and learn.

They may not get paid for it, but children’s play is their work. It’s a full-time occupation... and it’s important. The early years are the time when a child’s brain is developing, making connections and creating the network of skills that they need for the rest of their lives. By the age of five, most children will have learnt the basic skills needed for walking, talking, controlling their body and muscles and, amongst other things, figuring out how to manage relationships with others.  

As parents, what you do with your children matters and the time you spend with them is never wasted. You know your children best of all, so you can plan home activities according to what your children like and at a pace that suits them.

It is often said that, “a parent is a child’s first teacher.” Practice makes perfect so the more you observe your child as they play, the easier it will be for you to figure out what they may be learning. However, remember that you are not trying to turn your home and your surroundings into a school and playground – your child will be starting school soon enough – you are just thinking about your child’s play in a slightly different way.

Some children are active doers and always want to be involved in physical activity, expending lots of energy while playing with others outside. Others are happy sitting indoors and playing with their toys on their own for ages. Children learn in lots of ways and if you and your child are having fun and enjoying both the activity and each other, then it’s sure to be good for your child.

Children’s development can be separated into different areas: physical, social, emotional, language and thinking skills. These are, of course, artificial divisions as children are constantly learning skills in all of these areas.
So, for example, if you make a mobile for your baby and talk to them while they play with it, they are developing:

• Physically – playing with the mobile.
• Socially and emotionally – perhaps feeling your love for them in the words you use as they play.
• Language and thinking skills – as they listen to the words you are using and think about the shape and feel of the objects they are grabbing.

Developing physical skills

You may have heard the terms “fine motor skills” and “gross motor skills”. Fine motor skills include such things as controlling your fingers and hands, and developing hand-eye co-ordination, which helps you to judge where things are and pick them up and also hold and use objects such as scissors, pencils and paint brushes. Gross motor skills are more obviously what we think of as physical skills and include actions like crawling, running, jumping and kicking.

As a parent, you can provide the opportunity for your child to practise and develop these skills, for example, by encouraging your child to help with the washing-up. This may be messier and take longer, but more importantly, it will provide them with a chance to turn taps on and off, wash dishes and use a cloth for drying up. Playing with a box of cars will also give them opportunities to develop fine motor skills by moving the cars around, and gross motor skills by moving around the room to avoid obstacles.

Making an obstacle course

Creating an obstacle course in your garden or the local park is easy. You can set a sequence of tasks for your children to complete. What you do will depend on the space and equipment you have. You could try the following:

• Egg and spoon race.
• Filling up a bucket with objects, stone, sand or whatever and emptying into a bowl.
• Knocking down an empty plastic bottle with a ball.
• Kicking a ball through a tube.
• Throwing a ball into a box.
• Putting on a hat and dressing-up clothes and running ten yards.  

You can adapt the activities for children of different ages and set different tasks for different children. Timing activities, and having a prize and penalties can add to the excitement.

Developing social and emotional skills

What a child feels about themselves and the relationships they form in future years are built on their early experiences. By the age of five, children have become psychologists – they have learned to identify and manage feelings, they relate to others in a variety of complex ways and can begin to see the world from someone else’s point of view. However, though they’ll know about “mine” and “yours”, they may find it difficult to share things – something you will have to learn to manage. Games and activities help children express themselves and develop social skills such as co-operating, taking turns and becoming aware of others’ feelings.

Making a memory box

A memory box can be useful in helping your child talk about and share memories. You may want to mark a particular event or person:

• A happy occasion – such as a holiday, naming a baby or a birthday celebration.
• A change – such as moving house, going from pre-school to school.
• A loss – such as the death of a pet or person.

A memory box gives you and your child the opportunity to talk about something again and again, and you can add new things to the box as time goes on.  

Collect photographs, drawings, favourite objects and everyday items such as bus tickets, objects with a scent and so on, and put them in a box. Use the box to talk about the event. You and your child can make up a story or a poem to go in the box and add memories as you go along. Playing with and handling objects in the box can reaffirm good times and also help children come to terms with loss and change.

Creating a dressing-up box

You can put together a dressing-up box relatively cheaply by getting clothes from jumble sales, charity shops and friends. A dressing-up box encourages children to play together and to share. Shoes, hats and handbags always seem to work. Children love the opportunity to try out being someone else and it is natural for both girls and boys to experiment with high heels, handbags and swirly dresses as well as pretending to be firemen, policemen and superheroes.

You can also easily breathe new life into children’s games by providing new resources such as snack food, a few balloons or a doctor’s set. You could join in and play with your child or children. At other times, your children may be happy to play alone or with each other. Both can be valuable learning experiences.