Children who use their imagination when playing with other children are increasing their social competence and their understanding of other people. Imaginative and social pretend play is beneficial for children as it allows them to explore different ways of viewing the world. They can use characters to explore scenarios and act out scripts such as going shopping or bedtime. Young children playing with toys use their imagination to invent scenarios and play out the consequences. It helps them to begin to understand that other children think differently to them and have different ideas.Ĭhildren can engage in imaginative play with other children where they have agreed on a story or scenario that they want to act out. Young children in nursery benefit from engaging in imaginative play. As young children develop they begin to try to engage other children in social pretend play. Imaginative play begins when infants play and pretend with adults. A large proportion of pretend play tends to be social. Young children pretend or imagine that, for instance a wooden block is a cake and they carefully ‘cut’ it. Imaginative play has links to what psychologists call ‘social pretend play’. Children’s imagination is active from an early age.Imagination and exploration through interaction with characters.Play and practice with numbers is fun for babies and is essential for the development of young children’s understanding of quantity. Toys that count as babies, for instance, place bricks in a slot and computer games that present children with fun maths problems are also useful learning tools. Repetition is also important, for instance, singing counting rhymes over and over again gets babies used to number words and their sequence. Number games, learning about sequences and singing counting rhymes all help to enhance children’s basic maths skills. But this young child is still demonstrating the basic maths ability linking number words to actual numbers, realising that each item can only have one number word, and that the numbers have a sequence.
missing out the number 6 when counting 10 bricks).
A young child may make mistakes when learning to count (e.g. Counting rhymes are very popular with babies and young children and teach them basic maths concepts in a fun way. Research has shown that maths skills can improve with practice young children who are given plenty of opportunity to work and play with numbers and counting will improve their basic maths skills. Young children learn to match their culture’s number words and symbols (e.g.