Children grow and learn through play. It is especially important for nursery school aged children (three and four years old) to be involved in play to help them grow socially/emotionally, cognitively, and physically. Social/emotional helps the children learn how to interact with other people. Cognitive learning is building a child's intellect. There are two ways that children grow physically; small or fine motor skills and large or gross motor skills. Fine motor skills are being able to use small muscles such as your fingers, toes, and facial muscles (Gordon 425). Large motor skills, on the other hand, deal with using large muscles such as arms and legs, or even the whole body (Gordon 425). The four main types of play that help children grow in these ways are solitary play, parallel play, associative play, and cooperative play.
Solitary play happens when a child is playing by him or herself (Gordon 404). There is no interaction with another person. For example, take a child playing with blocks. It may appear that he/she is just stacking blocks, but they are developing fine motor skills because they are manipulating the blocks with their fingers (Dodge). At the same time they are learning cognitive skills such as cause and effect relationships, estimation skills, and sorting by shape, size, or color. They can also achieve goals (Isenberg 62). For example they can estimate how many blue, square blocks it will take to build a tower as tall as a tower built with red, rectangular blocks. The child might notice that if you build with your blocks height wise, instead of length wise, it would take less blocks to reach the desired height. .
A child coloring or drawing is defining fine motor skills so that he or she can start to hold a writing tool (Gordon 455). Once the child's skills are developed enough to do so, the child may appear to be just scribbling, but the trained eye knows that this child is learning how to hold a pencil, crayon, pen, marker, or whatever the utensil is that he or she is using.
