You all know that play is important for young children. But did you know that different types of play have different benefits for your child? This article is about constructive play, which is play in which children use materials to build things. Below are the benefits of constructive play.
Physical Development
Constructive play will help to develop your child physically in terms of improvements in fine motor skills. Through manipulating the objects, your child will have practice in using motor control of his fingers. It also helps with hand and eye coordination.
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| Look how this child used the fine motor skills in his fingers to place the block by relying on his hand and eye coordination. |
Cognitive Development
Constructive play helps develop your child's thinking skills. As your child tries to figure out how to build things and where to play each piece to make things work, he is using his problem solving skills.
Your child will develop mathematical concepts such as space, shapes, positions, size, measurement, weight, sorting, matching, counting and so on.
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| This child has built different 3D shapes which he asked for the names of each shape. |
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| When he asked me for this shape, I was stumped. So I told him let's look it up on the internet. We found out that it was called a triangular bi pyramid, basically 2 triangular pyramids joined together. |
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| This child was playing with these unifix cubes and decided to make a number 7. |
Language Development
As your child plays, he will use language to communicate with you or others while he is constructing. He will talk about what he's doing, what he's using and asking questions about certain pieces.
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| This child decided to make himself comfortable in the container and use the construction piece as a camera, commenting on what he sees. |
Socioemotional Development
While your child is building something, he will focus his full attention on it. This develops his focus and patience as he tries to finish his building.
Did I mentioned it's great for your child's imagination and creativity as well?
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| Look at how concentrated this child is. And what an imagination! These are pieces for a house and he has used it for his dinosaur. |
When your child plays in a group as he builds something, he will be developing sharing, turn-taking, cooperation and how to interact with others.
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| These two children are learning to play together as they built their city. |
If you haven't encouraged your child to play with construction materials then do so now. It is so important to his development.
For more information on what you can do to foster your child's development further, look out for my book that I'm co-authoring with other experts. Play is a part of a section that I have written about. The other sections include cognitive development, intelligence, language development, physically development and moral development.
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