At Chicago Children’s Museum, we know the power of play, especially during difficult times.
To highlight our commitment to our mission, to your children and families, and to play, we’re featuring Natalie Bortoli, Chicago Children’s Museum’s Vice President of Educational Programming and Experience Development. In this five-part Parenting Playbook series, we’ll hear Natalie’s expert thoughts on why we need play now—maybe more than ever.
By Natalie Bortoli
At Chicago Children’s Museum we have a “secret sauce” of sorts that guides us in making decisions about our programs and exhibits. It is a concept called Universal Pursuits of Childhood, in which we identify the experiences that children across time, gender, and geography, need, want, and love to do. These ways of playing and exploring sit at the foundation of all of our experiences and result in deep and meaningful engagement for children in our museum.
Active Play: Being physically active supports development of children’s healthy bodies. Running around outside, climbing, playing ball, or even just rough-and-tumble play on the living room floor can help to provide valuable opportunities to keep children moving and actively engaged.
Making Spaces: Building and inhabiting their own small spaces gives children a sense of control and safety. Gathering pillows, blankets, sheets, and building blanket forts can be a tried-and-true way to give children this opportunity.
Creating and Expressing: Creating art, music, or stories allows children to express ideas, emotions, thoughts, and frustrations, both verbally and non-verbally. The process of creating can also soothe and help children focus. Offer up simple materials from around the house such as paper and drawing materials, or household objects that can make sounds such as empty containers as drums. Creating a beat together or making a communal drawing or painting can be a fun way to make the creative process a socially-connected one as well.
Building: Constructing with materials uses cognitive skills, encourages problem-solving, and promotes iterative learning and resilience (if it falls down, figure out how to fix it, and try again). Utilizing blocks, Legos, or even a collection of plastic cups or boxes from around the house can create playful “construction zones.”
Sharing Stories: Engaging in stories, either through books, or made up and shared orally, allows children to escape into a different world, build on past experiences, make linkages to their own life, invent characters, and control the narrative. Keep your family’s collection of favorite books and stories at the ready or take time to tell each other stories from past events or your own imaginations. Is there a recently memorable experience you had as a family? What happened? Who was involved? What was exciting? What was funny?
Pretending: Trying on new roles (often adult roles) in an invented setting invites children to explore responsibilities and play out narratives where they are the decision-maker. This can engender confidence and a sense of control. Offering items of clothing (or making some wearable items) for dress-up, and re-imagining the living room into a school, store, museum, etc. can enable children to create a world of their own choosing.
Collecting: Creating a collection of objects allows children to look closely at the world around them and notice attributes and details, to sort, categorize, and develop interests and passions. Look for small collectible items from nature while you are out walking and create a display, or create a scavenger hunt in your own home for small objects with a shared quality: Let’s look for all objects that are both smaller than an apple and blue!
Sensory Play: Materials such as water, clay, sand, or foam allow children to engage their senses and understand physical properties of materials, invent their own usages, and find soothing qualities as they get absorbed in the tactile experience. Bath time water play, or even offering a pile of shaving cream to explore on a plastic-covered tabletop can engage children’s multiple senses. For children who experience sensory sensitivity, offer tools (such as scoops, spoons, or paintbrushes) with which they can manipulate the sensory material without touching it directly.
Engaging with Nature: The benefits of spending time in nature are well documented, and include reduction of stress, a sense of calm, and heightened focus. Offering plenty of opportunities to get outside to walk, explore, and play in these times are ever more important. Nature can also be explored indoors, by bringing in natural materials to observe up close (twigs, leaves, flowers, or stones), or even by spending time looking together at images of nature and describing what you notice, how it makes you feel, or imagining a story about the place.
Offering these multiple types of play to children is more important now than ever. Let these play types guide the possibilities for play in your own homes and settings, and be sure to check out Chicago Children’s Museum’s Recipes for Play at Home and at home activities in our Parenting Playbook for ideas!