Role-playing games Role Play
角色扮演 are the most typical type of games for children aged 3 to 6. Young children enjoy pretending to be characters or talking as imaginary animals, often mimicking adults or storylines. Role-playing games help children develop imagination, creativity, and social understanding, allowing them to incorporate everyday life experiences into play. Through role-switching, they recognize social roles and emotional expressions, such as pretending to cook like mom, playing doctor and nurse, dentist, dressing up as a hairdresser, and little engineers.
At this time, parents can engage in the children's imaginary world and participate in role-playing games together. Interactive dialogue can help them express themselves emotionally and linguistically.
Constructive Games Constructive Games
continue from age 2 to 6, where children gradually fall in love with purposeful building and creation using materials like blocks, clay, and sand. These types of games help promote hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, and problem-solving skills. During the construction process, they try different combinations and designs, primarily stacking blocks and simple arrangements. Parents and children can attempt to build simple structures together, encouraging them to make different attempts.
Spatial reasoning and cognition: When playing with blocks, children learn how to maintain balance, symmetry, and structural stability. Even when faced with failure, they can try different methods, and this cognitive flexibility aids in problem-solving.
Motor skills and hand-eye coordination: When stacking and combining blocks, children need precise gripping and placement. Parents can accompany and demonstrate to enhance children's fine motor skills.
Mathematics and logical thinking: Block games involve concepts of shape, size, arrangement, symmetry, and quantity, laying the foundation for mathematical abilities.
Simple geometric block shapes can train children's creativity, allowing them to conceive ideas in their minds and then create buildings with their little hands, freely expressing themselves in the process, creating houses, cars, castles, etc. When they complete a "masterpiece," it is important to praise them with encouraging words, giving them a sense of achievement and building confidence.
When choosing blocks, in addition to wooden or plastic blocks, parents can also consider designs without sharp edges, using materials from cork oak trees or building bricks and block toys that meet international safety standards.
Cork blocks have many advantages, including supporting sustainable production, made for ecological protection, sourced from nature's cork oak trees. Each block is soft and ultra-lightweight, allowing parents to let their children play safely.
Cooperative Games with rules (Cooperative Games with rules)
begin around ages 5-6, when children gradually understand and accept game rules, participating in group games that require adherence to rules, such as checkers, chess, and board games. These rule-based games help children learn social norms, cooperation, turn-taking, and fair competition. At this stage, children's social interaction skills significantly improve, and their participation and cognition require peer cooperation to complete the game.
Promoting cognition and problem-solving skills: During the game, children need to listen to others' opinions and respect different viewpoints, developing multi-perspective thinking abilities.
Following rules: Cooperative games usually include clear rules and objectives, and children learn to follow rules, plan actions, and solve problems, cultivating logical thinking and strategic skills.
Facilitator: Parents can play the role of facilitators in the game, enhancing children's sense of participation and achievement through questioning and encouragement, promoting communication and understanding between parents and children. By achieving common goals, children learn trust and responsibility from rule-based cooperative games, establishing good interpersonal relationships.
Through appropriate guidance and companionship in games, parents can not only enhance children's learning motivation and training abilities but also deepen parent-child relationships. Game time promotes interaction and communication between parents and children, making play the most beautiful shared memory.
