Bubbles are not just a fun activity for kids; they are an educational tool that we, as parents, can use to teach our children even more about the world around them!
Developing Visual tracking skills
Bubbles are an excellent way to help your baby or toddlers developing visual skills. We are not born with the visual skills we need for learning, including the skills to fix, follow, track, focus, converge, diverge and so on. These skills need to develop over time. How well your baby develops her visual skills, from the earliest months of life, will help her learn now as well as later at school. Because bubbles are both eye catching and slow moving they are a great way to help your little one learn to use her eyes and develop these skills.
Gross motor movement, balance and muscle tone development
For little babies, bubbles are a fun tummy time activity and every bit of happy tummy time helps with development! In this position bubbles also encourage head turning – right, left, up and down, movements that are needed to help control primitive reflexes, so important for future smooth, coordinated movement and learning.
Fine motor development
Once your child can grasp, he will want to hold the wand. It does get messy, but any practice at grasping, holding and manipulating the wand in and out of the container helps the development of fine motor control, important for the development of the correct pencil grip, writing and working with tools in the future. Give him plenty of opportunity to do this with both the left and the right hands
Hand-eye and foot-eye coordination
Popping the bubbles, be it with the whole hand, two hands, a finger, a foot or a toe all involve the development of hand-eye or foot-eye coordination. These early movement experiences form the basic building blocks of the catching, hitting, throwing and kicking skills involved in ball sports.
Spatial awareness and directionality
Bubble play can encourage the understanding of concepts such as; up, down, over, under, in front, behind, next to, above and below. For example: “Look up! There’s a bubble above your head!”
Speech, hearing and language development
Playing with bubbles provides many good opportunities for the development of speech, hearing and language. The early speech sounds of ‘buh’ in bubble and ‘puh’ in pop are naturally used and imitation encouraged during bubble play. As your child grows, bubbles provide many opportunities to encourage developing language skills as you talk about the bubbles being; big, small, wet, slimy and how they are moving; fast, slow etc
Developing Oral-motor skills
Once old enough, help your little one to learn to blow the bubbles himself. Blowing is good exercise for the developing muscles in the jaw and mouth. Learning to blow bubbles isn’t as easy as it seems and it may take a while to work it all out. Sucking in instead of blowing out is fairly common to start with but he will eventually get the hang of it and how to use the correct amount of force when he blows.
Developing Social communication skills
Bubbles are wonderful for groups, be they siblings, baby friends. The fun is infectious! In groups children further develop body and space awareness as they learn to move around and pop the bubbles without bumping into each other!