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Educational Value of Play - Social/Role Play
Social/Role Play
By taking children on outings to shops, restaurants, libraries, museums, parks etc, and by letting them recreate these outings in creative play, children develop ‘scripts’ for use in real life. This is essential in building their self concept and allows them to practice and experiment with the new concepts, language and interactions with others they have had.
Social/role play at home can be of many forms. It may be cardboard boxes made into cars or houses. It may be a dolly corner or pretend shop. It may be using a corner of a room and pretending it is a restaurant or hospital. It maybe a commercial play mat or play set where children pretend they are princesses or firemen or whatever. It may simply be a box of dress up clothes and jewellery. It does not have to be anything elaborate for it to be a rich and meaningful experience.
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Physical
Playing dressups sure helps children learn to dress and undress themselves. This develops gross motor skills as they manipulate clothing over their heads and their arms into sleeves. Do up buttons and velcro fasteners develops their fine motor skills as well as hand-eye coordination.
Language/Social
Development of language and social skills are embedded in playing make believe. Children are often less inhibited when they dress up and readily take on the role of their character. Dialogue between friends is automatic as they play out 'scripts' of behaviour. As they gain confidence in their social skills, their language develops as a consequence making it a fun, win,win situation. Children may need to write traffic tickets, menus and customer orders, receipts, draw blue prints, write prescriptions........ all valuable language/writing activities. Children should not be afraid to 'pretend' to write. It is called role play writing and is a very important step in developing literacy. It is very sad when I have little children in my class who won't 'pretend' to write because they know it is not correct and they feel like they are failing. Please encourage them.
Mathematical Concepts
A home/dolly corner allows children experiences in classifying items into set/subsets – eg sorting dishes into cups, plates etc, cutlery into tray compartments, fruit into their different types etc. Classification is the basis of developing clear, logical thinking which leads to good mathematical reasoning.
Children learn 1 to 1 correspondence of objects eg. setting a table with appropriate number of chairs, plates, cups, cutlery, napkins for the number of people coming etc.
Pouring juice, ‘cups of tea’ develops concepts of volume, of making volumes the same, and develops the mathematical language of empty/full, more/less/same.
A play shop helps children with familiarization with coins and associating value to them. They learn to exchange money for items just like the real life ‘scripts’.
Arranging items on a shelf is developing the concepts of classification.
They learn about the properties of 3D objects by handling boxes, cylinders, cones.
'Carpenters' may need to sort their nails from their bolts and work out how many nails they will need to fix their project. They have to measure to see if things fit or how long their wood needs to be.
"Doctors' may need to count heartbeats and check temperatures using thermometers. There are easy to use electronic thermometers easy for children to use.
