To engage children is to help stimulate their brains. Engagement through age appropriate activities for pre-schoolers maximizes their learning and development. This promotes active learning, and in turn promotes long term retention and a boost to their curiosity and inquisitiveness through activities like role playing, group projects, dress up days and show and tell.
Children are fearless when it comes to exploration. Exploration for toddlers is to play with what interests them so as to satiate their curiosity. Exploratory activities stimulate neural connections. During exploration children are actually using all their senses while they discover, examine and learn by looking, touching, listening and moving.
The highest form of research for children is through play. Free play is the reason why children build language skills and learn to interact with the world around them. Play allows kids to use their creativity while developing their imagination, dexterity, as well as physical, cognitive and emotional strength. Play, plays a very important role in the development of a well-rounded learner as they focus on the activity at hand, for eg. putting together a puzzle or playing with a ball, etc.
Children grow when they engage, explore and play. When children are allowed and encouraged to explore through engagement and perform activities their growth results into a healthy development of cognitive skills. Cognitive development is the way our thinking and understanding of the world around us changes from time to time and develops from birth to adulthood. The Growth of a child is an amalgamation of cognitive skills which include attention, short and long term memory, logic and reasoning, auditory processing and speed, problem solving, reading, etc.