It’s a play date
Heuristic play and creating treasure baskets are a great way for babies to learn about the world,
New mums often encounter the term heuristic play for the first time at a mother and toddlers group or when their child starts crèche. Heuristic play actually sounds much grander than it really is but do not underestimate its value: it is a term coined by child psychologist Elinor Goldschmied who developed treasure baskets for babies and the heuristic play approach for toddlers, which describes the activity of babies and young children as they explore objects from the real world.
The thinking behind it is not new and is something that we are all familiar with. Give a young child a present and more than likely, he or she wants to spend time scrunching the wrapping paper or eating it instead of playing with the toy itself. Our parents and grandparents already knew about this without even realising it. We played with saucepans and wooden spoons in the kitchen which we banged together, we stirred and poured rice with a jug and a funnel and a highlight was to have a basin of water!
Heuristic is defined as enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves. It is rooted in young children’s natural curiosity. As babies grow, they move beyond being content to simply feel and ponder objects to wanting to find out what can be done with them. By using a treasure basket with children at this age you are providing them with rich mental stimulation, which not only activates the growth of the brain but also provides highly satisfying learning experiences. Household or kitchen utensils offer these opportunities and can occupy a child for surprising stretches of time as they concentrate on stacking pots, exploring the objects or sometimes just enjoying the new and interesting banging noise of a wooden spoon on a saucepan.
Using heuristic play with babies stimulates all the senses, creating a rich learning experience as, during this stage, a baby’s primal instinct is to explore objects by handling and sucking on them in order to find out about their physical characteristics.
Parents love watching their children discover and explore, which is inherently what treasure baskets and heuristic play encourages. Nothing delights more than a child’s sense of wonder when they make a discovery and in turn it appeals to our sense of wonderment and delights as we observe children developing wonderment of their own. When a child makes a discovery, or an interesting sound is produced, they often repeat the action again and again, to test the result which strengthens cognitive development as well as muscle control and hand/ eye co-ordination.