I’m sure you have all enjoyed both watching and participating in imaginative or pretend play with a young child or in a group. Making cups of tea, cooking muffins or dinner, playing school, imitating you or other family members in daily tasks, dressing up, going out shopping, the list is endless. You might hear yourself being echoed in your child’s words – a slightly unnerving experience. Children begin this imitation at a young age, copying what they observe around them, what interests them and what they are trying to make sense of.
At different times this play can be enacted alone – solitary play – and there are times when children will play alongside another child and engage in parallel play, doing and creating similar stories but each staying with their own. As children develop – their style of play, language, capacity to negotiate, ability to take turns and share – we see children begin to engage in co-operative play. While on the surface this imaginative play appears simple and relatively loosely structured, it has many layers and offers the opportunity for significant learning for the child.
Opportunities for imaginative play are very important; this is unstructured time and can have both a spontaneous and planned element. In the ELC environment, educators will set the environment up for engaging opportunities and provocations for this play – beautiful and creative spaces, mud kitchens, small worlds, teddy bear picnics, collections of small figures, dress-ups etc. These setups are both in the indoor and outdoor space. In the home environment the opportunities are often more spontaneous in children’s playrooms or family rooms with their toys, and often mirroring what an adult might be doing in the home. All these opportunities are valuable and help children to develop and practice a range of important skills.
Children build their perspective; they use this time to process and make sense of the world around them, they develop critical thinking skills, solve problems, develop and refine their social skills and model what they see and hear around them. Young children are very keen observers! They develop and refine their expressive and receptive language, they try new words they have heard and repeat and practice them in these safe contexts, like trying on new clothes, and explore how the word or phrase sounds. They also develop social skills as they begin to play with other children or engage the adults around them – negotiating, sharing ideas, understanding the idea of collaboration – and through all of this they learn to manage their emotions, their needs and wants. Often, we see children engaged in imaginative play solving their problems or concerns – this is the critical value of child’s play, their work.
Wendy Seidler
ELC Director – Kew Campus
