Dramatic Play!

Dramatic play is an extremely important part of our curriculum. Outside of social skills, language development, the use of symbols, and the relief from emotional tension dramatic play yield, it also allows children to differentiate between real and pretend. This is readily apparent when observing children using exaggerated voices to signal that they are playing their roles or in the child that announces, "It's just pretend." It may seem as though a child who has spent several hours engaged in dramatic play has just been "playing around" and has nothing concrete to show for it. On the contrary, the kind of play where a child takes on a role, and learns to interact from within that role, is very valuable to his/her development.