Dr Rebecca Tortello | It’s all child’s play - This Christmas, remember to make time to laugh and learn with your children

As we head into the holiday season and begin to look forward to family time, UNICEF Jamaica is reminding parents that there is a free and easy way to build memories and important life skills at the same time. It's all about play!

Research tells us that learning and achievement are perishable, so when children are home for close to a month, they are at risk of losing some of the academic gains they would have made the previous semester.

Play is an easy fix. Not only does play encourage boys and girls to exercise their bodies and minds, it is vital for child development.

On World Children's Day, November 20, UNICEF Jamaica, together with many partners from the Government and private sector, staged a National Play Day, visiting schools across the island to support teachers and students in experiencing the strong value of play as an educational tool.

The goal was to model for teachers and parents how they could use simple activities in and outside of class to introduce or to review a topic such as nouns or colours.

These simple activities could include ring games, which help us to maintain important elements of our culture, or even 'telephone', in which a phrase is passed from one side of the room to the other via whispers from child to child and always winds up being changed, which is where the fun appears.

We also wanted to encourage teachers to infuse games in their teaching as much as possible. There are many ways to do this. We invite educators to learn more from the national game-based manual, linked to the grades one to three curriculum, which was developed by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information, with support from UNICEF. The manual is accessible on the education ministry's website.

A RIGHT

Play is a right that all children have. It is the way a child learns how to understand his or her world and, in many ways, him or herself. Play not only builds a child's sense of self-worth, it builds essential life skills - physical, social, cognitive and emotional.

Beyond the fun, child play has serious implications for later life. During the first 1,000 days of life, a child's brain is twice as active as an adult's. As the groundbreaking 'Jamaica Study' found, quality early childhood intervention increases earnings as an adult by 25 per cent.

At UNICEF, we've seen firsthand how powerful play can be through our EduSport partnership with the Treasure Beach-based Breds Foundation. The children simply light up on EduSport days.

Attendance is higher and aggression is lower because play releases stress at all ages, their time on task in class is better, and key literacy and numeracy concepts are reinforced.

This holiday season, make some time to play together. It can be as simple as a daily word challenge, like seeing how many words can be made from phrases like 'Merry Christmas, to doing some math problems (like those found at a great site like bedtimemath.org), or even having a candy-cane hunt or working on a holiday puzzle.

Play 'freeze dance' to holiday carols or even 'holiday tag', where you can only be freed by being touched and saying a holiday word. Whatever game you choose, play, laugh, learn, de-stress, and most of all, let the magic of play bring you closer together.

- Dr Rebecca Tortello is a UNICEF education specialist. Feedback: editorial@gleanerjm.com.