P.O. Box 1074 Mooloolaba Qld 4557 |
Limitless imagination
17 March 08
Imagination! That is the one word that describes your preschooler’s playful world of creativity. Imaginative play starts in the mind of your child when she plays with ideas, images, and concepts by re-organising, sorting, and creating. The pleasure of play motivates your preschooler to make sense of the adult world and construct her own reality.
Imaginative play is often very social. The possible outcomes of imaginative play among preschool-aged friends are limitless! As your child develops the social skills of playing with and getting along with other children, she is also learning to share ideas, hopes, desires, and wishes. Listen to your child and her friends play together and you will hear ideas that only imaginative play can evoke.
Imaginative Play - Exploring the Possibilities
Imaginative play is a keen interest of preschoolers as they learn to develop their ideas and explore the distinction between make-believe and reality. Children learn a lot from dramatising events from their daily – and fantasy – lives. When your preschooler invents a scenario and plot line and peoples it with characters ("I'm the mummy and you're the baby and you're sick"), she develops social and verbal skills. She'll work out emotional issues as she replays scenarios that involve feeling sad, happy, frightened or safe.
Imagining herself as a superhero, a horse or a wizard makes her feel powerful and teaches her that she's in charge – she can be anyone she wants. She's also practicing self-discipline as she'll be making the rules up herself or with a friend (the intricate rules children work out between them always astounds adults). She also develops an understanding of cause and effect as she imagines how a frog or a dog would behave in a particular situation.
Perhaps most important, creating imaginary situations and following them through to a conclusion teaches your child to think creatively and solve problems. In one study, not only did children who were imaginative when they were young tend to keep this quality as they got older, but they became better problem-solvers as well. Tested later in life, early "imaginators" had more resources to draw on when it came to coping with challenges and difficult situations, such as what to do if they found they'd forgotten a book they needed for school that day.