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Friday, March 29, 2024

Raise Your Play IQ – Baby Brothers, Birds, and Feelings: How Children Seek Understanding

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by Alix Tonsgard

This morning I had the opportunity to sit with a 3-year-old who was eager to share her world with me. She told me about her dog, about her music teacher, and about how her baby brother “knows how to spit up.” He is 7 months old. As we sat on the floor drawing pictures, one by one, her experiences with the world poured out of her.  

As I reflect on this exchange, I think about how this interaction beautifully illustrates the power of play. Every new experience a young child has teaches them something about the world, but they don’t just take that information in and move on. In play, young children work to master new bits of information, really wrap their minds around it, understand it deeply, and store it in their brains so they can recall that information and apply it later. In play, children are constantly seeking to balance new knowledge with that which they already know.  

As we continued to draw, she drew a circle and told me it was an egg. With the help of her mom, she was able to tell me that they had seen birds building a nest and laying eggs. Something happened which resulted in the parents abandoning the eggs. My new friend’s mother was upset and this led to a trip to Home Depot, in an attempt to create something that would get the parents to return. In that time, another bird came and took the eggs.

There was a lot of information this child was trying to make sense of: life cycles, the emotional reaction of her mother, and much more. Because she was engaged in an activity that she had chosen, she felt safe to work on developing her understanding of these complicated ideas. I am guessing she will continue to engage in imaginative play about birds and eggs as well as talk about this story for as long as she needs to. Then one day, she will reach a level of understanding or be ready to master something new, and she will move on.

At the Museum, we intentionally create experiences that inspire the desire to be creative problem solvers, driven to construct a deep level of understanding of the world. We are a place where children feel safe exploring, experimenting, and mastering, and a place where the important adults in their lives can actively take part in that process and see the learning come to life. This is why we believe in the power of play.

Alix Tonsgard is an early learning specialist at the DuPage Children’s Museum.

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DuPage Children's Museum
DuPage Children's Museumhttp://dupagechildrens.org/
The DuPage Children’s Museum’s mission is to stimulate curiosity, creativity, thinking and problem solving in young children through self-directed, open-ended experiences; integration of the arts, science and math; the child-adult learning partnership.

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