STRUCTURED PLAY in Early Child Education

STRUCTURED PLAY

Being an informed parent, you must have heard about the advantages of ‘structured play’ during early child education. ‘Play’ and ‘education’ in the same sentence sounds really strange !!! Can a child educate him/herself while playing a game or having fun? The answer is yes. ‘Structured play’ is exactly that. 

‘Structured play’, or ‘play with a purpose’, is any activity that offers your preschooler a specific learning objective. It could be learning a certain life skill like teaching the months of the year or working on important physical abilities such as gross and fine motor skills. For example, most games, puzzles, construction toys and organized sports are structured activities. Shape or color-sorting toys – where your little one must fit the blue triangle piece into the blue triangle-shaped hole – help her work on her matching and sorting skills.

Structured play usually targets specific skill sets, such as problem-solving, logical thinking or fine motor skills. The beauty of structured play is that it can be set up to target any specific skill set, from math to cookery. Children can then develop these important skills while they have fun. They might not even realize they’re learning! All that’s required for successful structured play is a bit of planning, some thoughtful adult input, and a solid learning objective to base the play around.

It can be hard for a preschooler to focus on one task for an hour, so many experts suggest breaking the play up into smaller 15- or 20-minute chunks. Breaking up structured playtime will also allow for a spread of variety of activities  throughout the day.

According to the National Association for Sport and Physical Education, preschoolers should accumulate at least one hour of structured physical activity every day.

Structured play is one of the most advantageous ways to get your child learning and having fun. Using games or attention-grabbing activities to introduce toddlers to a new skill shows them learning doesn’t have to be boring. Check out our collection of activities / games to encourage structured play with your toddler.

Structure play should not take much time for preparation, day to day activities can be converted into a structured play. Day to day chores can be seen as an opportunity to introduce new skills via structured play. Let’s take a look at few examples,

1.  while doing laundry, you can engage your child in sorting the laundry into colors and whites to exercise color sorting skills, you can also ask the kid to speak the color of the cloth aloud to promote the color name identification.
2. while folding the laundry you can ask the child to match the pairs of socks encouraging visual perception and pattern matching.
3. During a visit to the park, you can ask your kid to collect the leaves of different shapes, and back at home you can give a stick of glue and a paperboard to make a collage of leaves. To go one step further you can ask the kid to trace the shape of the leaves on the paper. On the next trip, ask the kid to collect the flowers of different colors and repeat the process.
4. On the way to restaurant, ask the kid to locate objects of different shapes, for eg. the tire of the car is a circle, the road sign is a triangle, and the menu card is a rectangle etc.

See how easy it is to convert everyday mundane routine things into a structured play. If you are interested in more ‘structured play’ solutions, explore www.cognitobox.com

So as a parent, try structured play as a main method of imparting learning on your child, because it is a great way to connect with your child and watch them having fun while getting into the habit of learning.