People of all ages must have heard the most common proverb during their childhood that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Children love to play. You give them the liberty to play, and they will play till they become tired and sleep. You cannot deprive children of playing, and if you do so, you are taking out the soul from their body.
Why Children Love to Play:
It’s not only about Play, children learn a lot from playing. The biggest thing that children learn while playing is building a relationship with other children irrespective of caste, color, creed, nationality, religion, and financial status. Dancing is an essential and critical part of childhood. Children explore and observe a lot while playing. They critically analyze everything and try to solve the problems that they encounter.
Importance of Playing:
Children are great learners, and they can learn a lot in their growing years. When children play, they try to connect their different senses, and learn to explore their environment, give words to their thoughts, uses their skills to solve tricky problems and become more responsible as a person. Playing is a practical method of learning where a child learns how to deal with uncertainties that he may encounter. Playing enhances and develops fine and gross motor skills of the child, along with the development of social, cultural, emotional, and relationship skills.
To enhance the process of learning while playing was introduced by the LEGO Foundation and is also backed by UNESCO, where they empower children in using their different skills like creativity and relationship and be lifelong learners because learning is an ongoing process throughout life.
Enhances Creativity and Imagination
There is a strong relationship between Play and creativity and imagination. Children have great sense of creativity and imagination and try to find solutions to various problems that they encounter in their daily lives around them. Playing helps children in the development of social and cognitive skills. Children should be given imaginative tasks while play so that they develop a sense of curiosity and inquisitiveness to solve those problems be a creative problem solver. It would be best if you never forced a child to choose a particular play as that will put them under pressure. They should be allowed to choose their games and play according to their interest and choice and moreover that gives them enjoyment. School field trips should be organized along with summer camps where children can learn a lot while playing different games that enhance their creativity and imaginative power to solve various problems. Summer camps and school field trips have come up with the idea of using creative, innovative, and educational teaching kids through Play. They use the innovative method of S.T.E.A.M(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) to teach children how to be more creative by using a simple object called LEGO bricks.
What are Lego Bricks:
Lego bricks are to toys manufactured by the LEGO Company that consists of small, colored, plastic blocks that can be made to join together and dismantled to construct buildings, vehicles, cities, camps, etc.
Lego bricks are used in the school field trip to enable children to learn about some real-world science like how an aircraft build or how to build a city or build different vehicles using their own imagination, knowledge, and creativity. This practical usage of their experience helps them in the integration of different subjects into one to explain the simple and day to day scientific concepts of building and creating various things. This type of playful method of teaching not only increases the brainpower for potential learning but also increases self-confidence in dealing with different problems.
Stimulates Brain:
Playing not only helps in the boosting of creativity and imagination of a child, but it helps in stimulating the brain to use its maximum potential. When a child is playing, the mind of the child gets activated and comes into action that does not happen in boring traditional classrooms. The child uses different parts of the brain that work together to help the child in taking up and finishing the task. This stimulation of the brain helps in the positive development of the child. It is essential and necessary for the schools to organize and incorporate school field trips, which helps the child in the overall development and the stimulation of the brain to use in a useful and meaningful manner in collaboration with their academics. By stimulating their minds, the children learn to communicate with their friends and peers; they will be able to test their knowledge in a practical sense and help them improvise in their problem-solving skills. It also helps them in emerging out as a more confident people in terms of social and emotional abilities.
Apart from school field trips, children learn a lot practically from LEGO summer camps where the child learns a lot from differently themed LEGO bricks. It is a very unique and fun-loving method of teaching different concepts of science and math to children in an exciting manner.LEGO camps are generally themed around some exciting topics such as Star Wars, Ninjago, Minecraft, Angry Birds, Bat League, LEGO Star Wars Camp, LEGO Super Heroes, EV3 LEGORobotics and Coding Camp, Angry Birdies/Bad Piglets Camp, Bat League: Heroes &Villains, Space Adventures Camp, Mining and Crafting Camp, Ninja Spinning Camp, and BRICK City Engineers.
Thus, the role of playing in the overall development of a child is quite evident. If you are keeping a child devoid of playing, then you are stopping his physical and mental growth at the same time. Please help your child in his or her overall development where they can use their brain to its full potential and be a more creative, imaginative, social, and knowledgeable child. Do not enroll them in traditional schools where playing is considered as a sin. Try to give meaning to their lives by providing them a platform by employing them lego after school classes and lego summer camps where they can chisel and enhance their creativity and imaginative powers to be a more creative and intellectual child.
As someone rightly says, “Children have a full-time occupation. It’s called Play. Let them be occupied by it from their early years until their twilight years”.