FREE SPRING ALPHABET ACTIVITY!
PLAY IS THE WORK OF CHILDHOOD
When parents ask what more they should do for their children, our response is always the same: let them play! As Fred Rogers famously said, “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.”
We couldn’t agree more. Play is how children learn about the world, themselves, and each other. It's as much a part of healthy development as eating vegetables, reading stories, and getting a good night’s sleep. There is no right or wrong way to play. It might be sticking a little hand into a pile of mashed potatoes…building an amorphous structure with blocks…staring out a window…truly, children’s play can be almost anything, and it will always look different depending on the day and the child.
Sometimes children will play with friends and other times, on their own. Sometimes they may speak out loud and other times, they will be silent, thinking to themselves. Sometimes play will be messy or risky while other times, it will be quiet and relaxed.
Children don’t need fancy toys to play. They need time, space, and the freedom to explore the ideas that interest them.
No matter how it may look to us as adults, when children play, they are learning.
Harmony at Home, our at-home preschool curriculum, is rooted in the idea that play leads to intellectual learning. To give you a peek at how we take hands-on and sensory play a step further—using it to introduce and encourage language and literacy—click below to download our FREE springtime alphabet activity—featuring seven different ways to play.
We hope you’ll join us in fostering your little ones’ love of learning through wonder, questioning, collaboration, experimentation, and investigation…all sparked by the joy of play that naturally piques their interests.
DID YOU ENJOY THIS ACTIVITY?
At Harmony’s Teachers Pay Teachers shop you can try all available Harmony At Home activities—seasonally themed and classroom-tested to be engaging, fun, and effective in developing your child’s academic, intellectual, and creative play skills. Your preschooler will use math, language arts, literacy, science, art, and fine & gross motor play to explore the wonderful worlds of the seasons!
