Dramatic Play
Encouraging Dramatic Play With Your Three-Year-Old
Encouraging Dramatic Play With Your Three-Year-Old
Three-year-olds love pretend play and use it to express their feelings and test out roles and situations. At this age, dramatic play becomes self-directed and is usually based on their own experiences. Preschoolers are becoming skilled at inventing characters and scenes, but they have a short attention span and so they change roles and scenes quickly. Three-year-olds like to set the scene by talking about it (stating that they’re playing “store” and “house”) and use dialogue to express their feelings (such as their sadness about missing an old neighbor). Three is also a common age for children to create imaginary friends, and they may talk for and to this special friend and include their friend quite naturally in daily activities.
It’s easy to encourage dramatic play. Simply provide a wide variety of props, including items that reflect their daily experiences (baby dolls, kitchen equipment, toy telephones), dress-up clothes, items to make role-playing realistic (empty cereal boxes and kitchen tools to “cook” in a child-sized kitchen). And most importantly, provide unstructured time for imagining and pretending.