Play is important work for your child’s development. It provides an opportunity for you and your little one to bond, while also stimulating the brain and forming connections between nerve cells. Play is amazing work!    Play can teach your children:

• Cognitive skills: Math and problem solving are part of play. Think of playing at a store set up in your family room.  So many skills go into finding necessary ingredients, choosing quantities, and paying for your items!  
• Physical Abilities: Children work on their fine motor skills when building towers out of blocks.  Running around on a playground or crawling through a tunnel give large motor skills a chance to exercise.
• New Vocabulary: There are so many new words when playing with dinosaurs or bugs! Those are all opportunities for learning new vocabulary words.
• Social Skills: Children can learn the rules of your family and how to care for others through play. They learn how to feed baby dolls or how to take turns while playing board games.
• Literacy Skills: Beyond books, literacy skills are developed in play.  Creating a menu for a pretend restaurant or using a doodle board are great ways to teach early literacy skills! 

  As parents, you are the biggest supporters of your children’s learning. You can make sure they have as much time to play as possible during the day to promote cognitive, language, physical, social, and emotional development.   Play is more than meets the eye!  Play is healthy, play is good for their brain and body, and play is FUN!