purposeful play

What is Purposeful Play?

beyond the playroom

purposeful play

We all know about the importance of play in the life a child, but what exactly is purposeful play? Isn’t all play purposeful and good? Is my child playing wrong?!?!

Well, the answer is NO-your child is not playing wrong and YES most play is good and serves some kind of purpose. Let’s take a closer look.

Say for example, you peeked into your child’s play space and they were throwing magnetic letters across the room. Let’s be honest-we have all seen this happen at some point!

Now, does that kind of play have purpose?

One could argue that yes, it is serving a purpose. Your child is strengthening their gross motor skills and probably getting out a fair amount of energy from chucking letters across the room.

But is it ideal? No…definitely not.

So, how could we turn this type of play into something more purposeful? Something that teaches developmentally appropriate learning objectives? How could this be turned into Purposeful Play?

Well, what if we grabbed a big bucket or a large pot from the kitchen. We could then ask our child to throw the letters into the bucket. The catch is they would first need to say the name of the letter and the sound it makes before they could throw it.

If your child is older and already knows letter and sound names-you could extend the activity by making it more challenging. You could challenge your child to spell out words. For example you could ask them to spell out “house”. They would need to throw each letter in the correct order into the bucket. Once they got all the correct letters into the bucket they could retrieve the letters and try a new word.

Now their play has a great deal of purpose. Their play went from questionably purposeful and definitely destructive to absolutely purposeful. Not only is your child getting to strengthen their throwing and aiming skills, but they are also working on letter, sound and word recognition all while getting out loads of energy!

That is the difference between play and purposeful play. Purposeful play is focused play that actively seeks to strengthen a child’s developmental growth.

As parents we play a large part in guiding our children into purposeful play. There are many things we can do to encourage this type of in-depth play. Below I will cover four things you can do to promote purposeful play at home.

purposeful play

How to engage your child in purposeful play?

Provide a Purposeful Play Space

Creating an organized play space for your child is a key component to purposeful play. A designated, organized space to play allows for your child to feel grounded and secure and allows them to become fully immersed in their play.

A play space does not need to be big or fancy. It just needs to be a designated space in your home where your child’s play materials are kept in an organized way.

Check out my Step by Step Guide to Creating an Organized Play Space.

Be in Tune With Your Child

look for teachable moments

I know this can all feel overwhelming! Just remember, time spent with your child doesn’t need to be anything fancy or expensive. You just need to look for those small moments that happen throughout the day.

Take little opportunities wherever you can. Maybe in the bath tub you talk about what floats and what sinks. Or how about while driving in the car together-you can point out street signs, letters and words.

At the end of the day always remember this: loving, reading and talking are the three most important things you can do with your child!

extend learning

There are many ways you can extend your child’s learning. I give lots of examples of how through out this website.

When you extend your child’s learning, you are expanding on concepts and learning objectives. You are actively looking for ways to get them towards their next learning goal.

For example, if you are working with your child on counting 1-10, you could ask them to clap one time, then two times and so on while counting. Now you have extended the counting exercise to include one to one correspondence.

Here’s another example. You just finished reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar. You then re-read it but this time you act it out together.

By acting out the book you are now extending your child’s comprehension of the story-an important literacy skill!

There are infinite ways to extend the learning from any activity you’re doing with your child! Keep on eye on my weekly posts for more ideas!

purposeful play

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