Acting techniques helps kids part 3

Dramatic Play Ideas & Activities for Children

As a parent or caregiver, you further encourage learning skills and child development as kids engage in pretending. Here are a few children’s activities and tips for pretend play.

Use stories: We invite your child to recreate a favorite story or take it further and add their own twist. During our pretending game, we prompt their ideas by asking questions like: “What do you think happened next?” and “What if the dog didn’t find his bone?”

Provide dolls and puppets: We at Cubbeco make sure your child has ample and regular access to things like dolls, stuffed animals, or puppets. These don’t have to be store-bought; they can be cut out of paper or made from socks. Through imaginative play, children easily ascribe feelings and ideas to these ‘people’ and ‘animals’ and often use them to express, explore and work out their own ideas, thoughts, and feelings.

We also Create “prop boxes”: Prop boxes are something most high-quality early childhood programs have plenty of. They are boxes (or bins, crates, or bags) with themed dramatic play materials in them. It’s like having a creative experience in a box.

Examples of popular prop boxes are a flower shop, office, restaurant, post office, and shoe store. We like to have a few materials in prop boxes and let your children’s creativity take it from there.

Make time: No material, environment, or story can take the place of uninterrupted time to play and explore ideas. Pretend play doesn’t fit nicely into twenty minute segments. We like to leave a post office in the in the Family Daycare that was create by the kids for a few days to allow your child to fully explore and enhance their creative explorations.

As children’s time is taken up more and more with scheduled activities, it is important to consider what they are losing when they miss out on pretend play.

In many ways, a few hours creating pretend ponies and galloping around the yard with fellow cowboys and cowgirls is as developmentally essential as any other pursuit.

So when we see your children engaged in pretend play, don’t rush them to do other activities we watch them, encourage them and explore with them what their pretend play is all about.

We allow time for them to build a rocket ship from chairs and blankets and pretend they’re astronauts; it’s time well spent. We also might consider crafting a space helmet from foil and a bowl and joining in!