By Susan B. Leavitt
We are bombarded daily with information about the importance of achievement by our children on tests once they enter school. Consequently, we are experiencing that “trickle-down” influence of the testing craze in education. As far as preschool education, I believe that we can get lost in trying to do the best for our children that we forget some of the basic things that children should experience in their early years.
Sometimes we want to make sure that Johnny is learning his alphabet or that because neighbor Jasmine can count to 100 and Johnny only can count to 10, he is “failing”. We feel we must need to do more drilling to make sure that Johnny keeps up with his peers. WRONG!
Children play princesses in a playhouse turned castle. Shiny paper crowns add to their eagerness.
We should be giving children many varied opportunities to experience things in the real world on the level that they can understand. Dramatic play is a perfect vehicle for many kinds of learning.
If we would like them to learn about fire safety, one way is to create a fire station where they can act out situations that might occur and learn about the help that may come from the fire department.
Math skills incorporate many different concepts such as patterning, sorting, counting, and understanding shapes and sizes. During dramatic play, children may have a restaurant where they sort foods by vegetables, meats, or breads. They may have to count how many people they will have to serve, so they become aware of matching items served with the number of people they are serving. (Did you know that it is important for children to have the concept of one to one correspondence? That is when they are able to see items and count each one accurately.) That skill is much more important than a child being able to count to 100 by rote.
Children engaged in dramatic play are using their imaginations, expressing inner feelings, experiencing walking in someone else’s shoes, recreating situations they experienced which may have troubled them, learning about cooperation, sharing, and developing language skills.
Dramatic play often starts in very young children by merely imitating something they have observed. This may be using the hairbrush as a telephone or a broom as a guitar. My grandson, at age 2, had seen a wonderful video of Peter and the Wolf many times. His dramatic play was a reenactment of the story of the ballet while he paraded around the house singing the hunter’s theme using the long wand of the vacuum cleaner as the hunter’s rifle. He was not just pretending, he was also developing gross motor skills and musical skills. My granddaughter, at three, made a video (with Dad’s help, of course!) while she sang Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars. She used a pencil as her baton and conducted while she sang. She was definitely working on memory, hand-eye coordination as well as her musical skills.
What are your stories of your child’s dramatic play? Please know that you are giving them a wonderful gift when you help them engage in dramatic play. It is one of the most age-appropriate kinds of education that a child can have. The child can be anything he wants, and can be in control of the situation which may seemingly be impossible in the real world.
Please know that at PSA we encourage this very much—the kids are not just playing, they are learning a great deal.
Children play 'house keeping' - a simple yet valuable form of dramatic play.
