You can ask any child about his/her favorite part of the day and the chances are that you will hear only one word i.e. the ‘playtime.’ Children all over the world, regardless of their location or the background that they come from, want nothing more than to enjoy and play around with their buddies.While many of the adults consider play as an indulgence that only the young ones are entitled to with no significant outcome, it is important for you to know that the renowned child psychologists hold a different opinion here.
According to child psychologists, playing is an essential part of life for every child and it is as vital for enjoyment as it is for the emotional, social, intellectual, and physical development of children. While it looks like children are ‘just playing,’in reality, they are developing habits, attitudes, and skills that stay with them all through their lives. When they play, the children learn to cope up with frustration, understand the importance of sharing, and feel the need for improvement. We, at the K.R. Mangalam World School, have seen that the lessons learned by children while they play are the ones that stay with them for life and that is one of the prime reasons why it is important to allocate adequate playtime to them every single day. According to us, the following are a few of the reasons which make playtime a highly significant learning tool for the kids.
Development of patience and understanding
Playtime helps in the development of patience and understanding in the young minds. This happens more when children play in a group setting where they need to consider the wishes and demands of their other friends as well. Even when children play alone, they need persistence and thoughtfulness in ensuring that the game that they have devised to play reaches the goal.
Improvement of cognitive abilities
We believe that one of the major contributions of the playtime is in the improvement of the cognitive abilities of the children. They need to think of the whole game plan and incorporate themselves as well as others in that idea. In most of the games that children play, for example, hide and seek, there is actual careful strategizing on the child’s part and that adds to their cognitive abilities.
Enhancement of social skills
Playtime is a crucial tool in enhancing the social and interactive skills of children. Take a child to a playground and you will see that he/she naturally comes out making many new friends that the child has probably met just a few moments back. Even those kids that are a little shy by nature can hardly keep away from the lure of enjoying with friends that their playtime brings to them.
Emphasis on imagination and creativity
Playing is one of the most significant activities through which creativity and imagination can be cultivated and expressed. In games like role-playing, children may pretend to be a mother, a cowboy, a firefighter, or a fairy, but whichever role they play, they demonstrate some knowledge of the roles and work through their own ideas and perceptions.
Testing and overcoming the limits
While playing, children tend to better analyze and understand their mental and physical boundaries and thus, they can work towards overcoming those limits. With the encouragement from their friends and the adults, they can actually manage to successfully overcome some of these boundaries and emerge as winners in the true sense.
Better decision-making abilities
The playtimes enable children to improve upon their decision-making ability and thereby opt for the best option available among many other choices. It has been seen that children who are rightfully engaged in their playtime activities tend to have strong judgments and are able to draw out better conclusions as well.
We, at the K.R. Mangalam World School,a premier education institution that leads the list of thetop ten schools in Gurgaon, believe that a fixed playtime daily is as important for the kids as their study time and both should be duly allotted to them. At KRMS, we always ensure that our pupils are given a good time for play and other recreational activities between their study hours. Our dedicated teachers know how to convert the playtime into some really useful learning tool that not only helps the kids to grasp better life skills but also enjoy and reenergize themselves to the core. We, at KRMS, understand that games are something that no child has to be goaded into and thus, it makes the best possible way to make them learn naturally. Moreover, the lessons imbibed through play are bound to stay with the kids for a lifetime, and this is exactly what we all aim for. Isn’t it!!