Is water play beneficial for kids

No child will refuse water play. Not only does it inspire creativity and imagination, but it offers great opportunities for kids to explore themselves and the world as well. As parents, it’s comforting to see kids focusing on water play happily and leave you some time for your own. Meanwhile, you will be surprised to learn that water play has so many benefits for childhood development.

The most obvious change is that children will develop gross and fine motor skills more easily. Lifting buckets, carrying them, and pouring water into the pool all involve using large muscles. When children squeeze bottles or sponges, they’re actually developing their small hand muscles. Through manipulating all kinds of tools and utensils, they develop better control over hand-eye coordination for different tasks.

Water is also a perfect means to activate children’s cognitive skills. Children will learn why and how everything happens. For instance, by noticing different objects flow on or sink in water, children will want to add in more stuff to see what happens next. Soon, they’ll find out that big and heavy things sink while small and light things do the opposite. What’s more, children have chances to learn how some maths and science principles manifest themselves in reality, which can help them better understand these ideas later in school.

Water play can be done at home, and children will also find it incredibly fun to take part in as a group. They may be played alongside each other at the beginning, but later you’ll find they naturally share with each other and work for a common goal, like simply pouring in a cup of water from the water pump in turn. All this will be great preparation for social skills development and friendship building.

Through cooperation with other kids, your child’s language skills grow as well. They’ll also meet a large number of new words like the play items or play scenarios. Even if it is solitary play, you can play a role in helping your children in developing language and communication skills. For example, you can simply ask them to narrate what they are doing, ask why something happens or encourage them to predict what will happen next. For children, this is a great opportunity to learn how to organize a group of words and sentences in a logical way.