Free Play for your little person

I was reading an interesting article the other day. Belinda Butler from Practical Parenting magazine discussed why it is important to provide “free play” for your little person.

Not only does it allow your little one to have fun, it also works on improving fine motor skills, language and memory, family dynamics and the social world, concentration and imagination.

I love reading things such as this – they tend to motivate me to do the very best for my little person and also encourage me to do different things that haven’t been done before. So, $12 and 9 dinosaurs later (thanks to Toys’R'us) we find ourselves out in the brilliant sunshine making “Dino World” in the sandpit. I actually had a lot of fun playing with my little person and we spent a good  40 minutes landscaping and building caves, mountains, lakes and roads (We also fashioned ‘nests’ for the dinosaurs, even though I think they had caves for rearing their young!)

Following the setup, Mia spent about another hour playing away happily with her new friends, imagination running wild, she found a little toy truck that was the park ranger checking on the dinosaurs, a waterfall was built out of rocks and blue cardboard and the Dino’s had a wonderful time frolicking in the sun too!

Allow your child to develop their imagination by helping (depending on what age) them build an area such as this, it doesn’t have to be dinosaurs, it could be water world, the zoo, a farm – whatever! Most toy shops sell plastic animals for these types of things, or you could get creative and make them yourself out of old toilet rolls or similar, then colour or paint them.

Through free play in this type of activity, little people increase fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination by handling and moving the animals and pieces around. When using imagination to act out play sequences, your little one is using memory recall to remember ‘what dinosaurs eat’ or ‘where dinosaurs sleep’ for example. They will show you their understanding of the social world when playing in this way – how do people interact with each other, who plays what role in the game. Exploration of the dinosaur family will show how your child perceives your own family life and who plays which role and lastly, your little person’s concentration is improved by enjoying a game so much that they sit and play quietly for a longer amount of time.

Belinda suggests asking plenty of questions as you and your little person play and also to use lots of foliage and garden material (such as leaves, logs, sticks and rocks) so that you can discuss these objects at the same time.

Watch as your little person becomes immersed in free play, creating and imagining all things wonderful – it comes as no surprise to me that I actually enjoyed this myself as well!

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