Pretend Play

Pretend play is often also referred to as symbolic play, imaginative play, dramatic play, fantasy, socio-dramatic or good old fashioned make-believe.

Pretend play serves many purposes and helps to push the boundaries of play.

The imagination of a child is priceless. Pretend play is a thinking skill.

To pretend in play, children have to understand the meaning of what is happening.

It allows children to explore new ideas and experience life from a different perspective.

• 6-18 months: As early as 8 months  a baby’s symbolic thinking develops. This is vital in the development of pretend play. At this age baby’s have become familiar with objects, actions, and ideas through observation and exploration. An early example of symbolic play would be a child making noise with their baby toys by banging them or shaking them :8.
• 18 months -2 years: Between 18 months and 2 years you may find that a toddler will begin to engage their first “pretend” games by acting out everyday actions they’ve seen adults do such as talking on the phone. A toddler’s play is much more connected to imagination.
• 2 and 2½  years: Between these ages you may see your toddler display signs of something called “representational thinking” and “symbolic thinking”. We discuss symbolic play further down in more detail but it is simply using an objector toy to stand in for another. Around this age the toddler may ‘real’ play with toys such as dolls – pretending to feed them and put them to sleep.
• 3 years: By around age 3, pretend play is at its height. The play often expands to include the creation of imaginary companions. These pretend friends often do things that the child or their ‘real’ friends cannot or does not do As a child develops their play begins to include fantasy, drama, and imitation.
• 4 years: By 4 years the imaginative play will include even more elaborate make-believe scenarios, with extended storylines and lots of character acting. Preschoolers, from ages 3 to 5 years, are more capable of imagining roles behind their pretend play. Their play becomes more social, and they enjoy make-believe play.

An imaginary friend is a way for a child to experience life from a different perspective. While the appearance of an imaginary companion sometimes worries parents, it shouldn’t.

Actually, research has found that preschoolers who had imaginary companions also tended to have greater imaginations and bigger vocabularies than their peers. They were generally happier and got along better with children of their own age.

• It provides opportunities for children to identify with the adult world.
• Children are able to practice and role play their understanding and interpretation of things they have seen/experienced or don’t yet understand.
• It facilitates their ability to practice negotiation skills, turn taking and sharing, listening, talking, observation skills.
• Promotes problem solving as it provides opportunities for them to play out problems with differing outcomes and experimenting with solutions.
• It enables them to further develop emotionally as they are able to act out their emotions and express their feelings.
• Additionally, they are able to take on roles that encourage discipline and empathy for themselves and toward others.
• Imagination is at its height as children can be anyone and do anything….they can take on the world in their pretend world.
• Children demonstrate thinking skills such as attributing properties to objects (a common example is pretending the tea is ‘hot’ or the baby is ‘sleeping’); they will use objects as other things (such as a box for a bed, a block for a car)

Pretend play provides children with the opportunities to imagine, create and experience their world around them….understand their sense of wonder. It enables them to put what they see into context through acting it out.

Children explore familiar experiences as they take on the roles of other people in their family or community from what they have seen or experienced.

Symbolic play is where an object is used to symbolize what they are playing.

To an infant or a young toddler, a block is a block. If she has more than one, she might stack them or pull them apart or even build a tower.

Around the 18 month mark a child starts using blocks for much more. In their eyes they can become a house, a car, or anything else they want.

Symbolic play is the ability of children to use objects, actions or ideas to represent other objects, actions, or ideas as play. A child may push a block around the floor as a car or put it to his ear as a their own mobile phone and proceed to ‘talk’ to the person on the other end.

Toys become symbols for other objects. They may try to feed a doll as if it were another baby. You may find that they sometimes hold a doll or teddy bear the same way you hold them.

This type of symbolic representation shows you how sophisticated their brain is becoming. It also allows them to prepare for, or work through, potentially frightening events and helps them to make sense of their world through ‘doing’.

• Dressing up — this is endless the variety of dress ups that could be provided. Hats, shoes, jackets, handbags, ties, capes, jewellery, pants, scarves
• Grocery store — empty food packets, pretend money, basket for shopping
• Parents — baby dolls, pretend food, bottles, nappies, putting them to bed
• Tea parties —teddies and/or dolls, tea set, tea pot, kitchen
• Workshop — table for a workbench, pretend tools, toys to repair, paper for writing ‘jobs’
• A surgery (vet/doctor) — toy animals, dolls, toy medical equipment, dress ups, ‘cages’ for animals, ‘pretend medicine’, paper for writing ‘scripts’, waiting room seats
• A restaurant/café — table, chairs, menus, cutlery, plates, pretend food..
• Work crew — playing in the sandpit with roads, trucks, graders, rocks and different loads etc. to create a play scene of transport vehicles
• Playing shops— cash register, price tags, money, shopping trolley
• Builder— trucks, makeshift ‘building site’, tools

Pretend play is an important part of your child’s learning and development.  There are ways that we as adults can support and promote imaginary play with your child.

• Asking questions: You can ask questions about the roles that they are enacting or exploring. Questions such as “what do you think the Doctor would wear?” Try to use open ended questions to encourage conversation and promote the play.  Ask your child questions about how they could extend or set up the play. Questions such as ” how would you set up the market?” or “what else could we use at the restaurant?”
• Encourage your child to think of possibilities: What would happen if type scenarios could be presented to promote thinking and extending on the play.