5 Ways Children Benefit From Attending Playgroup
1. Enabling a child’s emotional confidence to grow and expand
This will no doubt already be blossoming from your normal homelife as the best way to assist with a child’s development is to have great relationships and interactions with their family members. This gives the child a sense of stability and attachment. This can be with any manner of interactions with parents, carers, grandparents, neighbours, aunts, uncles or other family friends. A major benefit of playgroup is that children gain a wider radius of these interactions beyond their everyday attachments. Meeting these new friends and caregivers at playgroup allows for a safe test of separation from their carer. This is an extremely important life skill for children to learn at an early age as it builds confidence in children, encouraging them to be independent from an early age.
2. Social skill development, at their own pace
Whether your child is outgoing and full of self-confidence or just the type that prefers to play on their own it is perfectly fine and natural. Each child has their own approach towards developing their social skills. These are natural developments and each child will develop them at their own time, and in their own way. Dinotots Playgroup is all about following the lead of the child. Usually between the ages of 1 – 3 children start to develop their social skills, but as previously stated, this will be at their own pace. Moving on from there, usually between the ages of 3 – 5 children begin to fully interact with others their age whilst experiencing how other children react to that interaction. This, in turn educates the children to social boundaries – a very important lesson for later in life.
3. Supporting children’s imagination and creativity
At Dinotots Playgroup we encourage imaginative learning by allowing the children to play in an unstructured way. This is a key strategy for developing creative thinking in children. At Dinotots Playgroup we know that children develop 80% of their brain in the first three years of life and so we allow them space and invitations to play without labelling an activity or limiting their imagination with, for example, a dolls pram. How many times did you play with something as a child that wasn’t it’s main purpose? A Stick as a magic wand? A sheet as a super-hero cape? An empty box as…… well anything! This is what gets their developing brain firing. It’s all about creative thinking and how important a skill it is to enable the child to be successful in both their personal, and professional lives
4. Learning through role-play
Role-play and copying adult actions is one of the simplest ways a child can engage with the world around him or her. This is why you will have no doubt experienced your child taking dolly in a pram, comforting it’s imaginary injury and administering them their “much needed” medication, or something as simple as copying your actions while eating, brushing hair etc. Role play develops a child’s problem-solving curiosity by putting them, in their imagination, in real-life situations where they need to solve problems and think of solutions. Dinotots Playgroup creates the perfect, safe environment to bring more characters into a child’s expansive world. Role-play can also be encouraged at home with their families giving their children more practice role-playing as it is important, right from the very start of their development, for children to be actively thinking and learning
5. Encouragement to be more physically activity
Moulding clay, squishing Gloop, rolling playdough, running, jumping, singing, dancing, twirling and more! Your child will be extremely active when attending Dinotots Playgroup. However, if your child is not currently the physical kind don’t worry, we offer a range of activities at every playgroup session!