Most psychologists and experts agreed that playing is a form of child’s work. As your children grow, playing has more complex meaning for their development of mental and physical. By understanding the stages of playing patterns in children development parents will have opportunities to push children's stages of developments reached optimally. 1. Sensorimotor Play.
Sensorimotor Play is the first stage that apparently occurred from newborn to the age of three. In this stage, playing is more emphasized on skill development for gross and fine motor skills. Throughout this stage children are challenged by their environment to produce their first accomplishments. Meanwhile in the physical developments areas, child are learning to master hand-eye coordination, and also learn learn basic cognitive skill through cause and effect. In this important stage of playing pattern, children are developing path to what we called simple problem solving skill. Parent’s involvement through playing together with their babies is significant during this sensorimotor stage to build of closeness and to ensure that baby get the most out of their developmental toys.
2. Pretend Play.
The next step when baby reached 1 year, they will show a Pretend Play where they learn to imitate what have been done by their siblings and the adults. During this stage they start to understand symbolic patterns. This stage continuous until the kindergarten ages. In this pretend play stage, playing is becoming more complex as children performed a role play with day to day matters where they’re very familiar. The presence of toys and other children will help them to get exercised and at the same time engaged with new meaning. Other expert also called this stage as sosiodramatic play as most of the time during this stage are utilized by babies to interact with others and environment.
3. Rules of the Games.
By the age of 5, children are entering the stage of Games with Rules. This stage is characterized by ability of justification play patterns or games. Children already knew how to deal with plaything that has special mechanism. During this stage children are developed more advance their sociodramatic play that eventually is becoming more tangible. They are started to understand certain concept such as terminology of competition in playing. The involvement of you as a parent is getting loose at this stage as they have their own preferences in picking their playing patterns and kind of activities including “working” with their toys.
