8 Skills That Kids Develop On Playgrounds

Author: Austin Stanfel

Whether your kid enjoys tag games, swings, Foursquare, or the monkey bars, each of those activities provide children with the opportunity to develop and learn skills. Below are but a few of those skills, and this gives children all the more reason to use playgrounds.

Develop Fine and Gross Motor Skills

Both kids and adults have activities where they balance, jump, or slide. As adults, it helps us to better balance. For kids, though these activities help to develop motor skills they need to walk, jog, run, and even hold pencils better. Even climbing helps in developing motor skills as well as balancing, which helps a lot in the future.

Getting Along Better

There are going to be other kids on the playground as well. Kids from various age groups, sizes, and of course, personalities. This is all-important since we are social creatures, and we need to learn how to get along with others around us. Playgrounds provide an excellent opportunity for kids to grow their personalities.

Improves Physical Health

It goes without saying that play and exercise improve physical health: activities like children running around, climbing, working a seesaw. These are things that individually improve muscle groups, but over the course of an hour or two, such kids get a full-body workout without even realizing it.

Involves Kids From Various Abilities

This doesn’t just only mean different levels of strength but also those with disabilities. It’s warming to see that playgrounds are slowly starting to implement wheelchair accessibility in various parks. This not only helps children that are exposed to these sorts of abilities but also helps those who are in such challenging positions.

Expanding Emotional Control

There have certainly been times where children burst into emotions. Whether it’s anger, sadness, or crying, there are certainly times where that happens. But that doesn’t always mean we avoid playgrounds. This provides kids the opportunity to be exposed to these emotions and eventually learn to tolerate these frustrations or hurtful experiences and exercise self-control. As a result, kids can learn to walk away from those situations and still feel comfortable playing with others.

Exercise Imaginations

Kids have so many ideas in their heads, and once they start playing, it’s not long before they use their imaginations. Playgrounds provide a variety of opportunities for kids to use their imaginations and expand them.

Improving Balance and Coordination

As mentioned above, the various activities stated not only provide great workouts but also improves balance and coordination over time. If your playground has balance beams, see-saws or slides, the kids will slowly develop these skills the more they do these activities.

Developing Language Skills

This doesn’t necessarily mean learning another language on the playground. However, playgrounds still get many people talking and conversing with one another. When it comes to toddlers, they’re still learning how to talk. As a result, they practice and imitate based on the words they hear. It’s for this reason a lot of games have songs, and why there are rhyming games as well.

However, these activities aren’t just reserved for toddlers. Through playing, older kids learn how to better express themselves as well as communicate properly.