Children Learn Through Play: Essay Sample on Exploring the Benefits of Puppets and Toys

Introduction

Children require puppets, toys, and play games to enhance their growth and development. Puppets, in particular, can set a stage for valuable learning opportunities and development in different spheres of life. In this regard, puppets refer to engaging toys that are used to support children's communication, oral, and language development. Also, inanimate dolls foster teen's emotional development by enabling them to understand their surroundings. Children practice what they learn when they engage in puppetry games. Notably, childcare providers play significant roles in helping children to interact with puppets. Typical examples of inanimate play dolls are hand puppets, marionettes, and finger puppets. These objects offer children an engaging way to understand the world and also explore their knowledge. While puppet theatres provide a safe place for children to participate in puppetry performance, caregivers can help toddlers select suitable movable dolls for use at home. This research paper critically evaluates information in the literature to determine how puppets foster child development. The strength of any puppet is the ability to speak, move, and react to different forms of manipulation. Puppets foster development since it allows children to explore their feelings freely, therefore, promoting their interpersonal and social intelligence, which is critical for learning at childhood.

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Aim of the Research

The purpose of this study is to investigate how puppets impact a child's healthy development. However, it is worth noting that children at different stages of growth require different types of movable toys for proper cognitive and emotional development. This research, therefore, focuses on puppets that enhance children's critical thinking by exposing them to realities in their surroundings. Toddlers in early childhood require objects that train them on proper decision-making and solving of problems. More importantly, toddlers need toys that engage the mind, body, and even the eyesight. Since children have different needs, caregivers should organize activities that suit their respective stages of growth and development.

Description of a Hand Puppet

Glove puppet is one of the most engaging movable models that caregivers and parents can use in different settings to enhance children's development. Caregivers and puppeteers themselves can manipulate hand puppets to achieve specific emotional effects. Children can place their hands on the head of this object as they control their mouths, arms, and other parts of the body. Children can even hang over the arms of larger varieties of this movable doll.

This product support development, among toddlers considering that it has features that enable the puppeteers to manipulate them. Since the puppet's body movements stimulate specific visual impressions and emotions, the puppeteers develop skills that enhance their emotional and cognitive development. Also, children can give the puppet specific voices as they play with its control devices. Manipulation of this product exposes children to situations that help them develop empathy for others, and consequently, emotional development. Besides, puppeteers learn to empathize, respect the feelings of other people, and experience compassion as they manipulate and observe the reactions of the doll. Therefore, it could be said that this product provides a sense of security to children between three and seven years. The reason is that this object exposes puppeteers to situations that make it easier for them to express their feelings and thoughts that they may not feel comfortable sharing with their caregivers, parents, and guardians.

A study by Remer and Tzuriel indicates that movable toys, especially hand puppets, are effective mediation tools in early childhood (358). Its evidence shows that puppets have the potential to improve children's communication skills and address their therapeutic needs (Remer and Tzuriel 356). During early childhood, toddlers have thoughts and feelings that are characterized by animism. At this point, children are attracted to movable toys and play games since they perceive them as living creatures (Remer and Tzuriel 356). This aspect suggests that toddlers attribute many different roles to themselves as they manipulate movements of the puppets during playtime. In other words, it could be said that puppeteers, especially at the early stage of childhood, recognize movable dolls as a natural and legitimate part of the world.

There is significant evidence in the literature that playing with puppets has a valuable role in the cognitive, emotional, and social development of a young child (Remer and Tzuriel 357). Remer and Tzuriel found that puppets help children develop their emotions since it creates a process of "projection" (357). Precisely, a child's inner world is projected to a puppet where they perceive it as "myself." This aspect implies that puppets enhance cognitive and emotional development since it acts as an outlet for emotions. Research shows that puppets reach the hearts of many children across the globe and acts as a cross-cultural medium for psychotherapy and clinical therapy (. Remer and Tzuriel 357). It is also a framework for assessing a child's emotions besides being the basis of developing interventions for modeling behavior.

Role-playing with puppets enables children to develop their communication skills and learnings strategies. By interacting with movable dolls, puppeteers develop their confidence by expressing their ideas and conveying thoughts and opinions about the world. Encouraging children to wear scary hand puppets is also an excellent way to motivate puppeteers to communicate in different social settings. A new world opens up when children play with puppets since it places them in a social situation where they can be anyone they want.

Puppeteers use their imaginations when they play with movable dolls. This phenomenon explains why puppets are effective tools for enhancing creativity in school settings (Kroger and Nupponen 394). Puppets and puppetry are used for strengthening creativity because they force children to use their imaginations (Kroger and Nupponen 393). Toddlers, therefore, develop cognitive and emotional skills by interacting with interactive objects. Through puppets, children design rules, make roles, and, more importantly, use imaginations to come up with solutions. Inanimate play games place children in a situation that requires them to listen, understand, and analyze critical information before using in puppet play (Kroger and Nupponen 396).

Research shows that primary and preschool teachers perceive puppet play activities as a possibility for creative expression (Kroger and Nupponen 396). The reason is that engaging with movable dolls challenge puppeteers to express themselves creatively. It also provides an opportunity for children to nurture and improve creativity skills in early childhood. Ahlcrona studied the capability of puppeteers to create something new as a result of their interaction with inanimate objects (171). The study concluded that playing with movable dolls may enable toddlers to overstep the boundaries between the world of imaginations and the actual world (Ahlcrona 171). This situation place puppeteers in a creative dialogue that enables them to conceive visions of a potential future. During the research, Ahlcrona observed that a significant proportion of puppeteers expressed how they imagined that dolls knew, felt, learned, thought, and understood their surroundings (Ahlcrona 174). This aspect suggests that puppets trigger abstract thinking and mental processes that enhance creativity. Ahlcrona concluded that it is possible to create a learning environment that promotes creativity with the help of puppets (183).

Research shows that dialogical drama with puppets (DPP) facilitates the establishment of an environment that fosters a child's creative self-expression (Ahlcrona 172). Besides stimulating verbal activity, DPP broadens the content about the play, which is critical in strengthening creativity. Researchers have also found that inanimate dolls, like hand puppets, have the potential to help teens nurture their cooperation skills in the classroom (Ahlcrona 175).

Puppets are of great importance in teaching character education principles, especially at the primary level of education. According to Klein-Ezell et al., questions about the character and actions of the puppets help children understand that a person's actions relate to character education traits in different settings (2). Since engaging dolls help puppeteers talk about their ideas, it is critical for cognitive development, considering that it allows children to clarify their thinking and, more importantly, develop reasoning skills. Klein-Ezell et al. noted that teens tend to feel safe to ask critical questions that they would not be comfortable raising in the presence of adults (3). This aspect suggests that inanimate play objects make puppeteers feel comfortable in raising issues that are of great importance to their social, psychological, and emotional development (Klein-Ezell et al. 4).

Supporting Theory

Several theories in the field of psychology support the idea that inanimate movable play dolls have significant contributions to the healthy development of a child. The cognitive theory is of great importance in explaining how puppets foster the development of children. The theory asserts that children go through four phases of growth and development in their early childhood (Huitt and Hummel 2). The first stage is the sensorimotor phase, which occurs for the first two years of growth after birth. At this point, children learn about the world through interactions with sensations. The use of toys is inevitable at this stage because children develop thoughts that link their physical abilities and motor development. Hence, this theoretical model links with the use of puppets since they recognize that children explore their potentials by practicing to play.

The second stage of growth is the preoccupation stage, which occurs when a child is between 2 and 7 years (Huitt and Hummel 3). It is a phase of development where children discover meanings from objects through critical thinking. So, they strive to read meanings in their surroundings since they want to do things like other people. This way, puppets make children think of how they can best do things in the right way, like adults.

The concrete operational stage, on the other hand, is a third stage that happens when a child is between and 11 years (Huitt and Hummel 3). At this stage, children start thinking logically, implying that they imagine the feelings of other people in their surroundings. The formal operational stage, which is the final stage of a child's growth, is characterized by abstract thinking. As such, this theory supports healthy development because it recognizes that children use their abilities and skills to engage both physical and mental actions.

Conclusion

Puppets and related inanimate dolls promote emotional, social, and psychological development among children. The interaction between puppeteers and movable dolls fosters the development of social skills since it provides an opportunity for children to learn how to socialize with others. Teens also build their motor skills as they control and manipulate puppets to suit their desires. Besides, inanimate toys strengthen creativity in children since its play requires puppeteers to utilize imaginations as a way to manipulate puppets in the best way. Consequently, it encourages teens to conceive innovative ideas and creative ways of solving problems. The manipulation of these objects requires the coordination of the brain and the mind, implying that it enhances physical and brain development as children p...