Dedicating a small corner of your house for dramatic play can make play more interesting for your child as compared to your child’s usual play of his toys. A dramatic play corner sparks creativity and excitement, sure to keep your young one engaged for a period of time. Because dramatic play corners are versatile, these can be periodically changed to suit with your child’s current interest.
Here’s how to set up a dramatic play corner at home.
- Dedicate a corner
Yes, literally a corner. Creating a play corner makes the play environment more intimate and comfortable for the child, away from the comings and goings of other family members in the house. This allows him/her to fully immerse in dramatic play without any distractions.
- Fixtures
You want to have a table or a play kitchen. This forms the basis of how you want your dramatic play to look like. The table or play kitchen can converted to depict different types of settings. For example, the table or play kitchen could be a pizza parlour one day and a doctor’s clinic the next. It all depends on what you put out. What is important here is that fixtures are versatile enough to take on different ‘looks’ to suit the play setting intended.
- Materials
We encourage the use of realistic home materials in the dramatic play corner as this contributes to your child’s creativity in dramatic play. For example, using real pizza boxes, recycled boxes or bottle packaging of pizza ingredients for a pizza parlour dramatic play contributes to the authenticity of the play experience.
- Props
To bring your dramatic play corner to life, realistic props encourages imaginative play. Include a costume or two in the dramatic play corner for some dress-up fun. For a pizza parlour dramatic play, having a chef hat or a kitchen apron adds richness to the play. At the same time, these facilitates fine motor practice as your child is exposed to tying, snapping and buttoning cloth items.
- Unique touch
Having a dramatic play corner allows your child to contribute to the shaping of the space through little projects relevant to the current theme of the dramatic play corner. For a pizza parlour, some works your child can add to the space would be a crafty pizza parlour sign, a hand-drawn pizza menu and an order sheet. Not only do these projects make your dramatic play unique and personal, they also serve as creative platforms for your child to engage in some reading and writing especially when making the pizza parlour sign or the menu requires spelling and writing out the words.