Dress-Up

What Makes Childhood Magical? Part 7: Dress-Up Play

2014/05/08 admin Leave a comment

The Magic of Dress-up Play

Instead of needing a magic wand to transform boys and girls into princes and princesses, fairies, knights, pirates, doctors, superheros, or other characters, kids only need a dress-up box. Ordinary, everyday objects add to the play as a paper towel tube becomes a sword, a stack of bottle lids counts as pirate treasure and an old t-shirt has new life as a super hero cape.

Dress-up play has an important role in the magic of childhood. Children need to explore the range of ways that we relate to others: as the boss, the mommy, the daddy, the baby, the doctor, the patient, the store clerk, the shopper, the telephone answerer, the restaurant sever, the eater, the customer and more. What does it feel like to giver orders? Or, to be responsible for the care of others? While kids do not always use dress-up props as they play, they often put on some type of clothing to mark the change as they try out new ways of interacting.

Emotions are part of the human package and learning to control them needs experiences. Dress-up is one way to explore feelings, such as fear in a robber scenario, or anger when the friend playing the doggie pretends to break something, or happiness when being rescued by a hero. Emotions get tried on for size like articles of clothing.

Kids also need to test their own abilities. What’s the difference between super powers and regular ones? After all, to a child, if we can turn on a light by touching a certain place on a wall, why can’t we fly by jumping off a table? As superheros, kids practice what they have learned about their abilities and limitations.

Childhood can be magical and magic does exist as part of dress-up play. Does your child like to play dress-up? Could it be today’s play-of-the-day?

Holiday Activities

Kindergarten Readiness: Halloween Learning & Fun – Costumes

2012/10/15 admin Leave a comment

Developing kindergarten readiness is the same as helping your child with any new skill; it builds over time with lots of learning and fun. Halloween is an especially fun time of year and many of children’s favorite activities will be ones that are repeated from the years before. (This is not just a sneaky way to cover up doing the same old stuff!) These can be adapted as children grow older but much of the fun is doing things again.

Opening up the door to the costume trunk can be like opening the door to greet a friend you haven’t seen for awhile. It only took a pair of wee hands a few moments to dig thru these carefully folded items until they became one big pile of colors and texture. As each hat and cape was tried on, so was each character.

Kids don’t necessarily wait for Halloween to play dress-up. Often, they do it all year long. This pretending and imagining helps with development in many ways. Children test out what they already know to see if it “fits”. For example, as Lee put on the pirate hat and waved the sword, she tried to remember what pirates say. Her first attempt was “Er”, to which I replied “Ar”. She quickly changed her’s to “Arrr” too. As she talked about costume ideas with her mom, she thought she might like to be a whale, but later asked “Mommy, how can I be a whale with feets?” A problem-solving strategy starts with identifying the problem. This skill is another one that kids work on when playing dress-up.

Besides problem-solving, testing, and imagining, there’s lots of vocabulary to explore, too. What would a firefighter say, or a policeman, or a princess, or an animal? There’s lots of creative thinking, story-telling and emotional learning as well. When children pretend to be somebody else, they also pretend how that somebody else might feel. This is the important skill of empathy that will help kids understand others’ emotions and feelings.

Pretending one thing is something else, such as a small box being a robot switch, is called symbolic thinking and this is a foundation for later academic experiences. Kids also practice fine-motor coordination with all the zippers, buttons and different ways of moving in costumes.

What have you noticed kids learning as they play dress-up with Halloween costumes?