Child Development Activities Important for your Kids

Caregivers can engage their children in fun activities to support development across all areas. These activities can easily be incorporated into a family’s daily routine. They help children to develop cognitive skills, get ready for their school years, and build strong relationships with the people around them.  

Talk, Chat, Discuss, Converse

Children are language learners from the day they are born! One of the simplest – and best – ways to develop a child’s language skills is to talk with them. Every day presents new and enjoyable opportunities to introduce new words to your child and to develop their communication abilities. 

Ideas for engaging your child with language:

• Describe your food as you’re eating it. Use words to describe color, texture, and taste.  Ask your child to do the same.
• Use synonyms to expand your child’s vocabulary. For example, use different words for happy (excited, pleased, delighted), big (huge, giant, enormous), or kind (nice, gentle, caring).
• Play “I Spy” while commuting to/from school or other activities. Introduce new words along the way.
• Sing songs together.  Songs help children to remember new words and ideas. Rhyming songs help children to learn about sounds and the relationship between words.
• Take a walking tour through your house, neighborhood or park.  Make sure to engage different senses – and the words that correspond with them – by talking about sights, sounds, and smells.
• Ask your child to use three words to describe one thing every day.
• For ideas for conversation starters with young children, see the website Talking is Teaching.
• Narrate your day together.  Share about your day and ask your children to do the same. When activities overlap, tell the story together.
• If you can, speak more than one language at home. Studies have shown that bilingual children have larger vocabularies and a heightened ability to monitor their environments. 

Get Moving

Children love to be active – running, dancing, and jumping! It’s important to encourage physical activity for the development of their fine and gross motor skills. Children need at least 60 minutes of physical activity each day.

Ideas for burning energy with your kids:

• Play with balls – catching, kicking, and bouncing
• Put on one of your favourite songs and dance around your house
• Make up an obstacle course with found objects (e.g. jump over a stick, place a rock in a different place, and touch the grass and the sky five times)
• Act out one of your storybooks together
• Have animal races (e.g. run like a cheetah, hop like a kangaroo, soar like an eagle) 

Be Emotional

Children who can recognize and express their feelings are better equipped to face all kinds of situations.  Using a wide variety of feeling words helps children begin to understand and articulate their own emotions. 

Ideas for encouraging emotional expression:

• Use varied words to identify different feelings (happy, sad, upset, frustrated, mad, angry, excited, disappointed, etc)
• Play charades to match body language to feeling words
• Give your child creative outlets for expressing feelings like drawing a picture of how they feel or identifying colors that match different emotions
• Ask your child to consider things from another person or child’s point of view by asking how they would feel if someone did the same thing to them
• Do role plays to identify solutions to emotional situations (e.g. taking turns instead of fighting over a toy)
• Listen to different kinds of music and identify emotions associated with each kind of music 

Make Time for Free Play

Children learn best through play! Studies by the American Association of Pediatrics emphasize the importance of free, unstructured, play. Play helps children to develop their creativity and imagination.  It teaches children how to cooperate with each other, share and resolve conflicts.  When playing, children discover their own areas of interest, guide the pace of their play, and build decision-making skills.  Free play encourages self-sufficiency and independence. 

Ideas for encouraging free play:

• Keep a box of items for pretend play. This can include everyday items like kitchen utensils, pieces of fabric/ribbon, balls, or old dress-up clothes/shoes.  See where their imagination takes them!
• Don’t over schedule children.  Build time into your schedule for children to engage in free play.
• Let your children be bored. Some of the best ideas develop out of boredom when children are challenged to create their own activities.
• Plan open-ended play dates.  Invite other children over and encourage children to play together freely.  Give them space to develop their relationships with each other and to develop leadership and social skills.
• Make a box with chits of ideas for imaginary play (e.g. pretend you are on a train, pretend you are an artist, pretend you are at the zoo). Invite your child to draw a chit to get play started. 

Ask thoughtful questions

Young children are curious!  This innate curiosity can be encouraged by their caregivers to develop critical thinking skills.  When children ask their favourite question – “why?!?” - caregivers can engage in a dialogue with children, helping them to think through the way the world works. 

When a child asks you “why,” ask them:

• What do you think will happen next?
• What do you think will happen if you do that?
• Why do you think this is happening?
• How can we find out more about this?
• How do you know that? 

Get started today!  Choose one of the activities listed above and do it today with your child.  Incorporating these ideas into your days are a great way to engage your child in fun, age-appropriate, learning activities.