What Does Bouncing a Ball Teach Toddlers?

Social-Emotional Skills

• Babies learn to shift their emotional focus from their caregivers to themselves. As their physical world expands, they learn to explore and adapt to the differences that make individuals. Interaction with another player or group of players helps them develop play skills, including sharing, cooperation and use of simple conversation skills. Emotionally, toddlers begin as extremists who rejoice and cry with equal vehemence. Success -- or lack of it -- with a bouncing ball provides early lessons that help temper emotions such as joy, frustration and disappointment.

Physical Skills

• From 18 months of age until 3 years old, toddlers progress from staggering creatures who sit down hard to physically competent children. Along the way, bouncing, throwing, catching and chasing balls help train large muscles in arms and legs and small muscles in feet and hands to focus and respond to commands from the brain in a precise and efficient manner. Grasping, squeezing, throwing and catching the rhythm of the game all depend on physical motor development. Provide balls in a variety of sizes and bounce them with your child to challenge physical adaptability.

Intellectual Tasks

• Ball play provides an early example of an activity where toddlers must figure out the rules and where they must share control with another player. Games challenge comprehension skills and allow toddlers to take and give directions -- bouncing the ball between you and toddler is a simple beginning. It encourages anticipation and responses that adapt to the rhythm of the game. Playing ball is also a physical metaphor for conversation; it requires attention and perception as well as accurate actions -- called ̶0;coding̶1; -- of initiation and response. Use balls of different colors to reinforce color and encourage language skills by describing which ball she wants to use or which she likes best.

Sensory Motor Skills

• Toddlers test their environment with all of their senses. Grasping, they perceive texture and the body of the ball -- which can give them a good idea of how it will bounce. Eye-hand coordination grows as ball play continues with adult and play group partners. Encourage your toddler to watch the ball as it approaches, following its movement and listening to it bounce. Prompt him to ̶0;keep his eye on̶1; his target to develop accuracy. A word of caution, though -- toddlers still try to taste everything that they see or handle. Make sure that none of the balls in his toy bin are small enough to get into his mouth.