What Your Toddler Can Learn from Pretend Play

What Your Toddler Can Learn from Pretend Play


Is your baby spending more time in her play kitchen, cooking up soup and serving you tea? Is she playing more with her dolls, rocking them to sleep or dressing them for the day. This is because at 12-18 months old your baby is starting to become more interested in pretend play.

Pretend play, also known as Dramatic Play, is a form of play where children act out roles and situations.1 While it may start off with the simple imitation of familiar actions your baby observes in her every day life, it can develop into rich, creative fantasies by the time she matures into a late toddler or preschooler.2 Dramatic Play is important to her early learning because it helps foster her development of “abstract thinking, literacy, math and social studies.”1

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She is now very observant of all your daily actions, watching you do chores around the house, answering the phone, and driving to the store, among other routine activities. As a result, you will see her practicing all these activities during her dramatic play time. You may find her “sweeping” with a toy broom, “answering” the phone, or “driving to the market” seated in her push car.3,4,5

These first instances of pretend play are simple and brief,2 but they are now possible because she knows the names of familiar people, she has a growing Knowledge of Common Objects and Vocabulary Knowledge, and her long term memory is expanding.6 This knowledge base will let her pretend by copying actions she’s seen in the past, which is known as delayed or deferred imitation.7,8

Although your baby can copy actions in her pretend play during this stage, she won’t be extending her make-believe play to the use of symbols (one object representing another) until about 18 months of age.7 At 12 months old, she may use your cellphone to pretend talk with her daddy on the phone.3 But only six months later, don’t be surprised to see her talking into a banana instead!3

At this age, she is also getting a better understanding of her daily routine and some common rules. Since she knows the sequence of everyday activities, you may find her trying to take off her clothes when you turn on the water for her bath, reaching for her favorite blanket when it’s nap time, fetching her coat when you get ready to leave the house, or helping to put on her bib when she’s seated in her high chair for lunch.4

Sticking with a regular daily routine and sharing repetitive activities together will help support your baby’s understanding of daily life, not only building her Knowledge of Common Objects and Following Rules and Routines skills, but also giving her a base from which to develop her Dramatic Play. As she gets older, her pretend play will gradually shift from copying common, everyday life to becoming more rich in color and imagination.

Play Tips:

Do you want to know how you can support your baby’s development of Dramatic Play skills at this age? It’s easy! Read on for some simple tips to incorporate into your daily play time together.

  1. Invite your baby to take part in daily routine activities. Your baby’s early Dramatic Play will revolve around simple, imitative behaviors she’s picked up from watching you during your daily routine. Ask her to help you during these daily activities, whether it’s parallel “cooking” in her high chair while you make breakfast, brushing her teeth at night, or helping to wipe a spill on the kitchen floor. As she gets used to these routine activities, she will soon start using these actions in her own self-directed pretend playtime.
  2. Take notice of your baby’s actions and encourage conversation that extends her thinking.4,9 While she is participating in daily activities, be sure to describe her actions so that you can help build her understanding of her actions (also known as task-centeredtalk). For instance, as she uses a spatula and frying pan, say something like “I see that you are cooking something to eat in your pan.” Then, to stretch her thinking and extend her pretend play, ask questions about what she’s doing, such as “What are you cooking in the pan?”
  3. Incorporate writing and words into your baby’s daily play. As your baby becomes more and more interested in Dramatic Play, a great way to make the situation more real as well as support her learning is to use print whenever you can. A great example of this is to let her write down your order at the “Restaurant” with a crayon and notepad, or address a letter to mail at the “Post Office.”

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Developmental Milestones:

Has your baby achieved the following Dramatic Play developmental milestones yet? If yes, check off all the skill(s) she has already mastered to date using Playful Bee’s developmental milestones tracker. It’s absolutely FREE and easy to use, just click HERE!

  • Likes to pretend care for dolls (e.g. feeding).

 

Sources:

1Cecchini, Marie E. How Dramatic Play Can Enhance Learning. Early Childhood News.Retrieved March 12, 2014, from http://www.earlychildhoodnews.com/earlychildhood/article_view.aspx?ArticleID=751.

2Department of Health, Western Australia (2003). Pretend Play. Department of Health, Western Australia: Play and Learning Program (PAL). Retrieved March 12, 2014, from http://www.health.wa.gov.au/docreg/Education/Population/Child_Health/Play_and_Learning/HP1782_FS_7pretend_play.pdf.

3California Department of Education (2009). California Infant/Toddler Learning and Development Foundations.

4Maryland State Department of Education (2010). Healthy Beginnings: Supporting Development and Learning from Birth through Three Years of Age.

5Delaware Department of Education (2010). Delaware Early Learning Foundations: Infant/Toddler.

6The Natural Child Project. Basic Abilities and Play Preferences: Birth to Age 12. The Natural Child Project. Retrieved March 12, 2014, from http://www.naturalchild.org/research/ages_stages.html.

7California Department of Education. Cognitive Development Domain. California Infant/Toddler Learning & Development Foundations. Retrieved March 12, 2014, from http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/itf09cogdev.asp.

8Berk, Laura E. (2011). Infants, Children, and Adolescents (7th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon, Inc.

9Gellens, Suzanne R. (2013). Building Brains. St. Paul, MN: Redleaf Press.

 

Playful Bee

Education Team at Playful Bee
Playful Bee is an e-Preschool that delivers inquiry-based preschool learning from the classroom to your home. Our preschool curriculum was created by our talented team of rock star teachers. With years of hands-on preschool and Kindergarten teaching experience, they've developed a high-quality preschool experience that is convenient-to-use and easy-to-teach by you, grandparents, or your nanny at home.

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