The Importance of Dramatic Play in Teaching Children

"Hi, I'm Pam on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to teach you how to bring home fundamentals learned at school. Dramatic play is actually one of the best centers in the classroom. For starters, kids get to agree on things. They get to argue over things and it all works out because they are "pretending." They get to negotiate roles that they want to play. For instance, if you have a little boy and a little girl, and the girl says "I want to be the princess, hey, why don't you be the prince." Doing things like that, they get to agree on a topic. They can agree to portray different roles. Or, if you have two little girls, they can be two princesses in the center. Research shows that kids who engage in this type of play tend to show more empathy towards other children and they are also less agressive. They learn skills that help them cooperate with their peers and they learn to control impulses. This is also great, believe it or not, for math. When a kid is pretending to be at the grocery store, and they are ringing things up, they are actually learning about money and about counting. If they are pretending to set the table for dinner, their counting spots, their counting forks, their counting silverware. This also really helps kids with dealing with situations that their afraid of. For instance, many kids are afraid of going to the dentist for the first time. If you get them things that remind them of the dentist, you can sit down and pretend with them at home. Play going to the dentist; let them be the dentist so that they have the chance to see that their not scared. It's also a way to get kids to use their reading and writing skills, when their looking at posters or looking at the cash register that has things written on it. As you can see, dramatic play is really important in a classroom."