by Magda D. Healey

Created on: April 13, 2008

Summary: The whole life is an education for a toddler, but it's worth thinking about what skills you want your child to develop when choosing toys.

LEARNING THROUGH PLAY

I voted for "educational", but there is an and unnecessary confusion in the title of this debate. We are talking about toddler here - those little people that have just learned to walk, aged roughly 1 to at the most 3 years old. They don't distinguish between "play" and "education". I don't just mean that toddlers don't know the difference on a cognitive level, obviously. I also mean that, fundamentally, there IS no difference.

*The amazing growing babies*

All toddler play is, to some extent, educational. Most of the toddler life (baring routine care activities like nappy changing and going to sleep) is educational.

Babies come to this world as helpless, tiny, mewling creatures equipped with their basic instincts, certain temperamental propensities, some variety in the way their brains are hard-wired and, most of all, and immense, incredible potential for learning. Their brains are like sponges. Now wonder - they have to be to achieve what we take for granted. Just think about what happens in the first 3 years after the birth.

Three year olds are recognisably human: they can walk, run and skip; they can talk in language that is 85% grammatically correct and grows its vocabulary at an astonishing hourly rate; they are usually toilet trained, can feed themselves and are getting socialised. They already know a lot of things about the world in general and they have already learned the basic habits and customs of the culture they are growing in. They know about animals and objects, men and women, colours and sounds, friends and parents, safety and danger.

Most toddlers in the world achieve all these milestones with hardly any help from purpose-made toys. Those who live in the developed modern societies are provided with the additional stimulus of purpose-made play things (this probably to some extent makes up for the fact that they are much less exposed to the daily work activities of adults, as those tend to be conducted away from home and often in a mysterious environment of information-processing offices of knowledge based economy).

*the meaning and role of play*

Have you noticed how small children will play with anything? In fact, they will play particularly eagerly with anything new and anything that they have seen adults using. But of course they will: little humans learn by modelling. My

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