Early literacy and numeracy!
24th January 2023
Early imaginative games of peek-a-boo and 'Where's teddy gone?' all shape babies' imaginative thinking. Playing with treasure baskets,dens and open-ended materials lays the foundations for good exploratory and imaginative play and feeds inquisitive minds.
The connections between children 'being imaginative' and how this underpins their early literacy and numeracy skills link between imaginative play and children's ability to handle narrative' and 'create imaginary words to describe strong characters in stories and poems'.
At Braeburn Imani, it is a child's ability to think imaginatively that enables them to make the leap in their play from the concrete to the symbolic (in which a cardboard box, for example, can represent a spaceship). It is these same imaginative (and cognitive) processes that enable children to enter the abstract world of numbers and letters.
Children are gradually able to write down what they are thinking, rather than acting it out, representing a huge shift in their learning but one that is made easier and more pleasurable if they have first been able to experience and enjoy lots of imaginative play.
