Play can be categorised in many ways. The following suggestions may give you ideas for the type of toys you may like to purchase or make.
Play can be explorative, fantasy, creative, constructive, destructive, physical. It can also be a combination of any of these.
Explorative play
Young children are curious. They are born with a desire to learn. Learning occurs through exploration. Through looking, by touching and by doing.
Before your baby is mobile, he relies entirely on you to provide him with interesting objects to look at, to feel, to manipulate.
Information comes from exploring objects in the environment. In order to play with an object, a child needs to know what it can do.
Explorative play can be seen when your child pokes, prods, pulls, shakes, puts in and out of, feels, strokes.
It is helpful to remember that mouthing of toys or objects is part of exploration. Up until about 18 months, the mouth serves as the main information provider.
As far as is safely possible, allow your child to put toys or other interesting objects to his mouth, as he is learning about its properties.
Explorative playthings could be most anything from an interesting key ring to tupperware to sand and water play.
Fantasy play
From around 12 months, your child may begin to imitate things that you do. The beginning of real fantasy play is at around 18 and 21 months of age.
This, however, should not prevent you from playing imaginatively from a younger age! Fantasy play is linked to creativity.
Studies have shown that children with very active fantasies tend to have personality traits that contribute to creativity - originality, spontaneity, verbal fluency and a higher degree of flexibility in adapting to new situations.
It has not been proved that fantasy play causes this creativity, or whether this creativity that the child already has, inspires the fantasy.
Children who fantasise a lot have unusually good inner resources for amusing themselves. Although you can't teach your child to make believe, you can encourage fantasy play...
Provide materials that lend themselves to fantasy play (dressing-up clothes, dolls, housecleaning sets, stuffed animals), play pretending games together and make suggestions and encourage new ideas when he plays alone.
Creative play
This could include painting, pasting, tearing, cutting, printing, modelling, or playing with playdough, plasticine, or clay, collage - a simple form being a collection of cereal and other cardboard boxes pasted onto each other and for the older child, experimenting with fabric, painting, tie dye, batik and printing and simple woodwork.
Start involving your child with creative activities as soon as you feel he will enjoy them.
However, do remember that young toddlers aren't skillful enough or really mature enough to consciously produce works of art.
At 18 months he may be more ready for creative play and even at this age, he may spend no more than five minutes of concentration on any one activity.
This does not mean that it has no value at a young age.
Remember with a young child, it is the process and not the product that is of importance. The end product is not what counts, it's the process and experimentation your child goes through to get there!
Constructive and destructive play
Lego, building blocks of any description and property - wood, fabric, plastic, woollen, cardboard, tin.
Pop-a- beads that link together and come apart. A pile of pillows that can be built and destroyed over and over again.
It is fun to construct and fun to break it apart too.
Building and breaking can increase your child's understanding of the properties .
Physical play
Movement plays an extremely important role in your child's ability to learn. Even his first movements provide him with essential information that can teach him about his world.
Piaget, a developmental psychologist, believed that movement and thinking were totally interdependent.
Not only do movement games strengthen the muscles of the body, movement also aids in developing many perceptual skills.
Some movement activities may develop an awareness of the body, spatial orientation laterality and direction, balance, eye hand and eye foot co-ordination, it may promote the co-ordination of the two body sides.
By providing opportunities and encouraging exploration in the physical realm, you are in essence preparing the groundwork on which all academic learning will later take place.
Do remember, as far as milestones go, to enjoy and make the most of each phase of development, as each phase is filled with skills that need to be learnt and established before the next phase.
Each new skill develops from a less organised skill. Your baby needs to sit before he can crawl, and he needs to crawl before he can walk.
Each baby develops at his own rate and in his own style. No two babies are the same.
Repeating skills
Your child will enjoy repeating activities over and over again.
This helps him to refine his mastery over the activity, is challenging and provides a tremendous sense of achievement.
As one skill is mastered, it helps to develop another perhaps more complex skill.