Experts and parents know that play is a valuable learning tool for children. Dramatic play, when children assign and accept roles and engage in imaginative play, is important in developing many cognitive skills. Marie Cecchini, M.S., explores the value of and offers suggestions for helping foster this type of play in her article “How Dramatic Play Can Enhance Learning.”

What Children Bring to Imaginative Play

Children bring existing skills to dramatic play, and the act of dramatic play in turn enhances these existing skills. The skill sets children develop through dramatic play are role playing, use of materials, pretending, attention span, social skills, and communication.

Children mimic behaviors of others as they play different roles, and they incorporate realistic materials to do so. Those “real” props are then replaced with substitutes (pretending a rope is a fire hose, for instance), and then with imaginary ones.

Children use their imaginations in dramatic play, playing “make believe” as they pretend to be others. The more dramatic play a child experiences, the longer the amount of time he spends in play, developing his attention span.

Interaction with others is a necessary component of dramatic play, as children learn to relate to one another from the perspective of their roles. Practicing give-and-take conversations and choosing words wisely are incorporated in dramatic play as children work together as players.

Areas Dramatic Play Develops

There are four areas in which dramatic play enhances development: social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language. In addition, because dramatic play engages children in learning, it increases their understanding of their world.

Children negotiate with their peers to decide what topic they will choose and how to put on their “show.” In so doing, their social and emotional skills develop as they work collaboratively. Consequently, children who engage in dramatic play tend to display less aggression than those who do not.

Dramatic play enhances physical development as children try out different roles. Both fine and gross motor skills are engaged in dramatic play, as is eye-hand coordination.

Children make use of their cognitive skills when engaging in dramatic play. They recreate past experience through play, enhancing abstract thinking. Sharing ideas and solving problems together are natural by-products of imaginative, dramatic play.

Children have to practice their language skills to express and explain what they are doing in their “shows.” When props such as magazines and food cans are added as props, literacy skills are enhanced.

An Inviting Dramatic Play Area

To encourage dramatic play, incorporate a range of materials such as tools, vehicles, hats, clothes, etc. Materials like a chalkboard, pencils and papers, and greeting cards will encourage development of literacy skills. Incorporate materials that can be used in more than one way and that are developmentally appropriate, and keep the props rotated so that they change on a regular basis, encouraging new configurations of existing materials into different dramatic scenarios.