play-based activities

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Sensory play encourages curiosity, sensory experience and experimentation)

•    Sand and water play
•    Finger painting
•    Texture play
•    Skills Learned

The senses are children’s most familiar way to explore, process and come to understand new information. Children can develop and create a sensory perception by grabbing, smelling, listening, rubbing, tasting and staring. They use their senses to collect information and from that, attempt to answer their own questions.

As educators talk with children about what they are observing and sensing, they give them new language tools to connect with these more familiar sensory tools, building language as well as supporting cognitive concepts specific to the experience.

Cognitive play encourages recognition of colours, size and spatial relationships and teaches children to classify, sort and construct.

•    Blocks
•    Puzzles
•    Skills Learned

Cognitive play is important for the growth of those skills used for critical thinking, analyzing, logic, recall and problem solving.  Blocks and puzzles help develop math skills and encourage cooperation like turn taking and teamwork. Cognitive play also helps to develop a child’s vocabulary by encouraging children to describe sizes, shapes and position differences.

Pretend play facilitates the development of social, language and literacy skills, self-expression and problem solving.

•    Dressing up in costumes
•    Playing with dolls
•    Playing with cars and trucks
•    Playing grocery stand and shopping
•    Skills Learned

Young children learn by imagining and doing. The process of pretending builds essential developmental, social and emotional skills. Pretend play also encourages language, thinking and problem solving skills. When children engage in pretend play, they are actively experimenting with the social and emotional roles of life. Through cooperative play, they learn responsibility and how to take turns and share.

Manipulative play facilitates fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and develops the small muscles.

•    Button sorting
•    Marbles
•    Puzzles
•    Threading
•    Beading
•    Skills Learned

Fine motor skills are important building blocks for a variety of skills in young children, including buttoning and unbuttoning, lacing shoes, tying, zipping, dressing, bathing and writing.

Fine motor development requires movement of the small muscles in the fingers (index, middle, and thumb) and wrists, usually in coordination with the eyes. Children are learning how to develop hand stability by building muscle strength. It is also important to give children the chance to take things apart, put them together and figure out how they work.