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Dramatic Play Ideas: How To Use Pretend Play Games To Help Kids Learn And Grow

27May2019
Dramatic Play Ideas: How To Use Pretend Play Games To Help Kids Learn And Grow
SHEROES Work From Home Opportunities

Dramatic play or pretend play can help kids deal with real-life situations. Read this article for many role-play topics to help your kids learn and grow.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world. ~ Albert Einstein

When new moms or children’s tutors find it difficult to teach kids social skills at home or in school, an educational tool they can use to teach them such skills as dramatic play or pretend play for kids.

The idea of children’s role play is based on the fact that the children need to understand real-life situations and learn to adapt to those situations and take appropriate decisions.

This is often best achieved with the help of make-believe or pretend play, which also helps increase creativity and confidence in toddlers and enhances their risk-taking abilities.

According to Hanne Rasmussen, the chief of the Lego Foundation, due to a lack of awareness and understanding, both parents and the formal schools don’t consider children’s pretend play or role-play in education as a priority.

The significance of role-playing or dramatic play for children is grossly underestimated, ignoring evidence that proves the remarkable importance of play-based learning for children’s cognitive development.

The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights has also emphasised the value of play for optimal child development and considers it the birthright of every child.

Fantasy play, imaginative play, pretend play, or dramatic play helps the child to engage in and interact with the world better and also use their creativity and cognitive skills to develop an emotional response to any given scenario.

Further, social skills role-play activities aid them in countering regressive practices like child labour, child abuse and of course, bullying.

This article will help you understand the importance of dramatic play or role-play for kids’ and the contribution of pretend play to the overall development of your child.

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What is Role-Play, Dramatic Play or Pretend Play?

The meaning of role-play or dramatic play or pretend play is the simulation of various real-life scenarios to imitate and find realistic solutions to. As Aristotle said, “for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”

For example, if you want to educate your child against bullying, you can take the role of the person being bullied to help them develop empathy towards you and save you from the bully, enacted by another family member.

Helping your child understand the implications of bullying will not only build their confidence, in case they fall prey to such situations in real life but also encourage them to defend or help friends or peers being subjected to bullying.

It may seem like pretend play or imaginative play at first, but it will definitely impact the mind of the child in understanding the negative effects of bullying and related scenarios.

Role-play is not merely a fun activity, but a learning tool to help us build socio-cultural concepts in the minds of children and assist them in learning moral and emotional behavioural concepts at an early age.

In fact, if you’ve ever played a role-playing video game, such as Skyrim or World Of Warcraft, where the player controls the actions of a character or tabletop role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, then you’ve engaged in role-playing.

The importance of children’s role-play in education is not just confined to helping a child remember certain theories and basics more effectively, but also to help them develop their creative skills and problem-solving abilities.

Imaginative Play

Advantages of Role-Play Or Pretend Play Games

There are many advantages to the role-play method of teaching. Creative role-play can have a huge impact on the cognitive development of the child.

Dramatic play activities for toddlers and preschoolers can help them develop cognitive, psychomotor, social, emotional and language skills.

According to the famous scholar and development psychologist, Jean Piaget, the role of such imaginative play or pretend play helps in the development of two basic cognitive abilities of the child – conservation and perspectivism.

While conservation is basically an understanding that people or objects remain constant when they are not subjected to environmental changes, perspectivism is a concept that relationships are not affected by social or environmental changes.

A few experimental studies also concluded that well-organised pretend-play activities have quite an impact on the overall social development of children.

Let us take a look at some other key benefits of role-playing in education:

  • Helps children understand real-life situations better and react accordingly
  • Enhances social skills through teamwork and coached role-play sessions
  • Increases the child’s ability to experiment with, explore and enhance their creative abilities
  • Develops their linguistic skills through constant communication
  • Enhances their socio-cultural knowledge by giving them an idea about their surrounding environment
  • Improves their sense of expression in a controlled, yet relaxed environment
  • Helps them enjoy education as a mode of play, and not a boring learning or training session
  • Develops their imagination and creativity
  • Helps them become aware of emotions, feelings, moods, abilities, actions and reactions in relation to other people as well as themselves

While subjecting a child to stressful and conventional modes of studying may impair their existing creative abilities, creative role-play reverses this trend and makes the child sharper, more intelligent, and creative.

The importance of dramatic play or role-play in teaching is the same as that of role-playing for children’s development. Teachers, who wish to employ non-conventional modes of teaching can arrange for role-play classroom activities in small groups.

A teacher may create small groups to educate children in using the internet, sending and receiving emails, using mobile applications and more.

You can also teach them the basics of communicating with strangers, being helpful or being aware, helping parents in household work, like cleaning and gardening, and also educate them against social atrocities like child abuse, bullying and child trafficking.

In fact, you can create role-play ideas for almost every life situation to help the child grow into a socially aware, responsible citizen. And that is as much the job of a teacher as it is of the parents.

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How to Find Dramatic Play Ideas for Kids

Are you wondering what tools and equipment you need to create a dramatic play or role-play activities for kids? Well, that depends on the age of the groups taking part in those activities.

If you’re organising dramatic play activities for toddlers or role-play activities for pre-schoolers, all you need is the equipment to create a realistic environment for the kids, apart from the basics like cameras, voice recorders and speakers.

You can also develop role-play sessions based on their stated choice of occupation and help them use their imagination, while you create the environment to help them simulate such roles.

For example, if your child wants to be an astronaut, you can create a NASA-like environment before you start teaching them concepts like the Solar System, the Milky Way and related topics. They will remember these facts for a long time if they learn them through a role-play activity.

Then again, if your child wants to be a doctor, you can develop a pretend-play scenario, where you take on the role of a patient and ask them to operate on you. You can then teach them the basics of human anatomy through this fun session.

Dramatic Play Ideas

You can also use role-play scripts from Indian mythology, stories of Indian freedom fighters or historical figures to help children learn and history in a more exciting manner.

You can teach geography through the eyes of famous explorers like Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Marco Polo and Roald Amundsen.

How to Organise Role-Play Activities at Home or in School

Now that you’re aware of the advantages of the role-play method of teaching, your next consideration will be to develop role-play scripts, dialogues and costumes to make it exciting for children.

If you’re organising dramatic play activities at home, it would be a good idea to create a dramatic play area at home so that kids have a safe area to play without hurting themselves or getting into trouble.

Before you start, you need to ask yourself some basic questions:

  • What course should you choose to create role-play topics for the kids?
  • What will be the best-fitted situations for them to explore?
  • What type of role-play toys should you buy to give the sessions a realistic touch?
  • How to pick a role-play area, which will best suit the script?
  • How to develop the role-play story script, which will be easy for the children to understand and take an active part in?
  • How much technological input will make the role-playing games for the children more entertaining and successful?
  • What role should you take, as a tutor, or a parent, to exploit the children’s creative skills at best?

Once you’ve decided all this, the next step will be to provide them with an easy understanding of the role-play topic and help them choose their roles for themselves.

You have to make the role-play games interesting for kids to take part in, whether it is the situation or the imitation of the environment.

If you’ve picked a social topic, you have to make sure that the idea does not become too difficult for children to grasp, and it should be something that they are aware of.

Likewise, if you choose an educational dramatic play topic, you have to make it exciting enough to grab their attention to the end and help them give their best.

Children get bored easily, so the selection of role-play topics becomes a deciding factor for the success of the activity.

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5 Fun Role-Play Topics To Keep Kids Engaged

An engaging and fun topic for pretend-play games goes a long way to help preschoolers learn the most important lessons of life. There are numerous role-play activities for children, which have been discussed in details below:

1. Career-Related Pretend Play Games for Kids

One of the best ideas to engage children in classroom role-play activities is to encourage them to imitate their career choices through imagination and expression.

Whether a child wants to become a sailor, a mountaineer, an engineer or an astronaut, you can develop scripts for each and help them enact their roles in a constructive manner.

They may then learn about the advantages and limitations of their respective career choices and also learn how to take the necessary steps in approaching their career paths.

Help them define their aspirations in a creative manner and fill them in on the details of achieving success in those fields.

For instance, if a child wants to be a sportsperson, you can develop a role-play script with emphasis on physical fitness, strength and regular exercise.

Again, if a child wants to be a cancer specialist, you can emphasise the importance of science and technology in their script. That way, you’ll be giving them ideas and concepts regarding their specific life choices at an early age.

Dramatic Play Activities

2. Fantasy Fiction Dramatic Play Activities

Nowadays, children are huge fans of fantasy fiction. They love to imitate their favourite superheroes who save the world. You can take this chance to instil in them a sense of empathy and awareness against injustice and social atrocities.

If a child wants to be Wonder Woman, you can help her develop a script, in which she acts as the saviour of war victims, thus giving her an idea of the effects of war.

If the child wants to be Spiderman or Batman, you can help him understand the importance of protesting against bullies and child abusers.

If each kid starts to think of themselves as a superhero, they can easily be taught to stand up for what’s right and protest against the wrongdoings in society.

3. Fairy-Tale Role-Play for Kids

The idea of a fairy-tale is not just about living in a dream world, but an assertion that the good guy wins at the end, and poetic justice is always served.

You can develop role-play scripts  based on fairy-tales like:

  • Sleeping Beauty helps children understand that the good always prevails, even if they lose to the intentions of evil at first.
  • The Beauty and The Beast help them understand that the beauty of the mind is more important than the beauty of the face.
  • Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs help them realise that no matter your limitations, you can defeat evil if you work together.
  • The Little Mermaid emphasises the value of true love and sacrifice.
  • The Jungle Book can help them understand the value of forests, animals and how to maintain a balance in Nature.

Creative role-play scripts based on such fairy tales will help build social consciousness in children and help in their emotional and mental development.

4. Home-Based Dramatic Play Activities for Kids

Apart from classroom role-play ideas, you can also come up with domestic role-play scripts to help children get an understanding of household functions and their roles in them.

You can teach them to help their parents in household work as well as keep their rooms clean and engage in sustainable activities like gardening, farming and more.

In this way, they’ll learn the benefits of keeping the home and environment clean, and supporting their parents and will grow into responsible adults.

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5. Environmental Pretend Play Games for Children

Today, the need for preserving nature is greater than ever. Children must be taught at an early age the concepts of sustainable living.

You can do that through pretend play games, where they are given the roles of trees and animals to understand their importance in creating a balance in Nature and to teach them empathy.

This is one of the best dramatic play ideas to create awareness about environmental issues and ways to counter the threats to our environment.

Role-play activities not only enhance psychological and cognitive development in children, but role-play games are also important in enhancing physical strength through adventurous scripts like The Vikings, Pretentious Camping, Mountaineering and Hitch-Hiking.

Yes, you’ll need adequate tools and gear for these pretend play games, but it will definitely be worth the effort.

Dramatic Play Centers For Children

Are you finding it too difficult to organise role-play activities for children at home or in school? Don’t want to go to all the trouble of organising a role-play activity yourself?

Then you can organise a fun outing to dramatic play centres and interactive indoor theme parks that educate kids through real-life role-playing activities.

The realism of these dramatic play activities, complete with role-play costumes, helps children learn about different careers, work and learn how to manage money.

Do you know of any more pretend play games or dramatic play activities for children or students? Let us know in the comments below.

About the author:

Priya Florence Shah is the Group Editor at SHEROES and author of Devi2Diva, an emotional self-care book for women.

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Also read:

Dramatic Play Ideas Pretend Play Games To Help Kids Learn And Grow

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