Play Skill Development
Play skills are integral to early childhood development and contribute to sensory integration, the mastery of gross motor, fine motor, cognitive, receptive language, expressive language, and social skills. Play is a dynamic process that enables children to express their concerns, fears, and desires, as well as to communicate with their environment in their own ways. It also allows them to become socialized and contributes to building strong caregiver-child bonds (Ginsburg et. al, 2007). Oftentimes, Speech-Language Pathologists, who are also early intervention specialists, will focus on the development of age appropriate play skills as a prerequisite/co-requisite to speech-language therapy.
At Not Too Little Speech Therapy, we incorporate play throughout ever therapy session. We strongly believe in providing caregivers with evidence based strategies to take their own play skills to the next level.
Did you know that play skills occur in a predictable order from birth through about four years of age? There are 6 stages of play during early childhood, all of which are important for your child’s development. These stages include unoccupied play, solitary play, spectator/onlooker behavior, parallel play, associate play, and cooperative play. Another important type of play that emerges between two and three years of age is pretend play (Pathways, 2023). Did this pique your interest? For a full descriptions of each stage & type of play, as well as additional articles on play see the links at the bottom of the page.
How should you play?
So how should a care-giver play without being bogged down by knowing which stage of play to focus on? At Not Too Little Speech Therapy, we follow the "Talk, Read, and Sing" model developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and promoted by the US Departments of Health and Human Services and Education. "Research has found that providing children from birth to five with consistent, language-rich experiences — such as talking, reading, and singing — can have important benefits on their brain development and future school success (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2023)." Therefore, we teach caregivers how to incorporate talking, reading, and singing into their play and daily routines to bolster their child's language acquisition and expression skills.