Role Play
Have you always wondered what your child is thinking about when they pick up phone and pretend to be on a call with someone? Or thought about their creativity as they picked up a cushion and drove it around pretending that they were driving a car?
"Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding." – Lloyd Alexander
There are fundamental benefits of children engaging in role play activities to support the enhancing skills that are required for their development. Along with these activities being fun, allowing the children to use their imagination within play improves their creativity, promotes better performance in their education and helps them to develop a strong problem-solving approach when resolving conflict. This is because it allows them to take up characters that act out real life roles.
There are several types of role play;
Reasons Why Role Playing is Important for Your Child
1. Encourages Creativity and Imagination
According to research, a child’s capacity for cognitive flexibility and creativity are linked to role playing. They exercise their brain and train it to practice using imagination at an early age.
This is not only important in problem solving, but even later in life a good imagination helps you enjoy a good book, plan for pleasant things in life or simply understand other people’s point of view on various aspects of life.
2. Enrich Language and Enhance Communication Skills
Children are usually very quick to pick up new words. Add this with a character they love and a whole new vocabulary is built. Role playing offers them an opportunity to try these vocabularies. Using new words, they will gain confidence to use their communication. They learn to convey a message by picking their words carefully. In turn they subsequently learn to listen. The benefits of these skills are seen later when they start learning to read and write.
3. Develop Social and Emotional Skills
During role play, children place themselves in an imaginative social setup in which they must find a way to interact with others. Quite often during this play, the children will experiment with a role of a person or character they would like to be.
This makes it possible for a child to empathise with someone else and is therefore able to understand why these people or characters do what they do. Your child can relate to his or her emotions as well as gain control over his behaviour.
Role playing also helps your child learn conflict resolution, for example while playing with others they may argue on who will become the villain and who will become the super-hero, they will have to brainstorm for the potential solution together, and this is how they learn about teamwork. These skills are valuable even later in life.
4. Enhances Physical Development
When you see them run around to “save the day” or scaling up ladders to put out a fire, or even just be up on their feet applying makeup on your face as their model, know that they are engaging their motor skills and hand to eye coordination.
How to Encourage Role Playing
@BananaMoon - 1 year ago
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We are open 7.30am - 6.30pm
Harlow
Banana Moon Day Nursery, Netteswell Orchard, Park Lane
Harlow
CM20 2QH
info@bananamoon-harlow.co.uk
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