Purposeful Play Program
What is Purposeful Play?
Through purposeful play, children engage in an enjoyable activity with a parent/caregiver/teacher while supporting the growth of vital skills. Specific domains are targeted, such as cognitive, communicative, adaptive, social-emotional, and motor (physical) skills. Purposeful play offers children the opportunity to develop and practice these skills in a planned way to maximize the benefits of play.
Why Do We Need it?
We need purposeful play for a number of reasons. We as a society and within our community are encountering a growing number of children who are unable to cope in everyday situations due to lack of development in the skills mentioned above. This often presents itself in the child’s inability to communicate, play, self-regulate, learn, build relationships and basically “handle life” in an appropriate way.
We are seeing more children coming into school that are physically (brain & body) not ready to learn. A child’s incomplete muscle development, sensory processing issues and self-regulation problems are often areas that seem to be greatly lacking in development and areas that need to be improved before a child is ready to function in a school (social) setting. This is now becoming such an increasing issue that we feel children would benefit from purposeful play and specific instruction to improve these areas. When these skills are adequately honed and developed, children will be able to successfully problem-solve and self-regulate in everyday life.
Therefore, children NEED opportunities to play BEFORE they enter into school. “1,2,3 Come Play With Me” can help implement the strategy of purposeful play (and more) within our community. We can accomplish this by working with young children AND their parent/caregiver to support the global development of the children in our community and beyond through PLAY!
What Does This Program Look Like?
The foundation of this program is the use of movement, weight, and sensory activities to support child development and learning. This program consists of three phases and looks different for each childcare center depending on number of classes and students.
Phase 1
We plan, set up, and implement big-body and sensory activities for preschool classes to rotate through. We bring and set up all materials for several weeks. We leave books and some materials for the classes to use until the next week.
Phase 2
We go into classrooms to teach small group lessons to show teachers how their curriculum can be taught through these activities involving play.
Phase 3
We leave take-home bags for every child to take home each week. These bags contain toys, books, play ideas and information for parents. The information lets parents know the benefits of play, the academic skills being targeted, and insight as to what their child is expected to know for kindergarten.
