Did you know that children do not make a difference between learning and playing?
Children learn through play!
Children have a natural desire to explore things with their hands and the other senses.
Do you remember how your baby put everything in the mouth? This is how babies actually learn about their surrounding world – by touching things and putting them into their mouth. Even children up to the age of 6 years still have very limited capacity to understand abstract concepts, such as a written numbers, shapes or letters. They still need to experience those concepts concretely to fully understand.
Playful and hands-on learning provides children with opportunities to practically experience the world around them.
Maria Montessori once said ‘What the hand does, the mind remembers’.
Play is a fundamental necessity for children and fosters their social, emotional, intellectual, linguistic, physical and mental development.
To fully understand, children need to be able to experience something practically – touching, feeling, seeing, smelling and hearing it.
Benefits of Play
If you want to support your child to develop and learn, the best thing you can do, is to play a lot with your child.
Here is why:
- Play allows them to use all their senses.
- Play strengthens their fine- and gross motor skills.
- Play helps them to better focus and concentrate.
- Play fosters their imagination and creativity.
- Through play children learn to find solutions and come up with new ideas.
- Through play children learn essential cooperation and negotiation skills.
- And most importantly when playing, children communicate.
How a playful learning approach can help you to raise multilingual children
This is why I believe playful learning methods are the best way to support children learning multiple languages.
You do not need a lot to provide your child with a rich play environment that will help your child to further develop his language skills.
Here are a couple of ideas to get you started:
- Play memory games to develop and strengthen vocabulary (Read here how to easily create your language memory game)
- Play I see something you do not see …. .
Say for example: I see something you do not see and it is red and round. Then your child has to guess or find an object around your home which is red and round. (for example a ball). Here are some more ideas for language games. - Play with toy animals and learn their names, using this 3-step Montessori playful learning method
How to get started with Playful Learning
In this FREE 3-Day Video-Course I am showing you the first steps you can take to stimulate and engage your child in playful learning activities at home without tantrums and without any materials you have to buy.
Hi, Nice to meet you
Learning and growing up with multiple languages does not have to be hard work. I am Maria, a mother of 3 kids, an development and education expert and Montessori homeschooler. Having lived as a family over ten years in Africa and Asia I know exactly how challenging it can be to get access to high quality educational activities. With my step-by-step playful learning method, I am showing you how to raise little happy multilingual learners with limited time and only using local materials.
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