Guest Author - Jeanette Norman

Play is your child's tutor. It goes far beyond simply encouraging learning activities. When you think about it, play often contains an element of risk. Risk is involved when standing on a stage reciting a single line in the Thanksgiving play. He takes risks whenever the group's activities call for running, jumping, and bumping.

Play also has significant educational value. In time, a preschooler learns to formulate plans, develop strategies, and exercise his assessment skills in problem solving because of play.
Through play, children learn that their personal gratification is often dependent on their cooperation with other children. Play teaches children about partnership, teamwork, and fair play. It is through play that a child's primitive understanding about "rules" is reinforced because most games have rules.

Play is also therapeutic both physically and emotionally. Physical play releases the pent-up energy stored during times of restriction. The child is released to play with others. Physical play is a pressure valve allowing for the release of energy. In the preschool years, play must have some outside activity that has a physical dimension attached.

Imaginative, emotional play is freeing to the preschooler. Such play allows a child to test his desires, fears, and hopes without the risk and hardship of judgments and boundaries associated with reality. Children need to be able to control some things. Repetition gives a child the chance to consolidate skills needed to solve board games and puzzles, to stack blocks, to or connect Hot Wheels tracks. Success and accomplishment reinforce the cycles of learning.
Parents give little consideration to the fact that if a child is in any way deprived of imaginative emotional play, either through discouragement or the lack of freedom at self-play, he will equally be deprived of what it is to know hope. It all comes back to the importance of play.

Play also contains the element of construction. One component of play common among children worldwide is the construction component. Children are builders, and their efforts reflect the knowledge of our day. Little girls also use construction in their play, but tend to make finer and more delicate objects such as doll clothes and paper dolls.

It is through the medium of play that a child first develops his sense of fairness and cooperation and it is in play that moral strengths and weaknesses show up. How your child moves the board game pieces, scores his game, follows the rules, and shares with others reflects his developing moral identity. Lessons in right and wrong and consideration for others, drive a child's social experience. Children do not like bullies and quitters, but they enjoy children who know how to play by the rules and love to share. Your child's moral sense creates either a positive, rewarding, and affirming response from other children or rejection. Most socialized play will always have a moral component. How well prepared is your child?