Building a Powerful Dramatic Play Area at Home

Why dramatic play?

Dramatic play is an essential childhood modality in which young children develop cognitively, physically, socially, and emotionally through assigning, accepting, and acting out roles. To illustrate these benefits, let’s look at a scenario familiar to many parents: sharing a pretend meal with stuffed animals. It may seem simple, but this imaginative play is deeply empowering for children. As they assign roles, try on personas, and make decisions, children take charge and exercise agency — a departure from teacher-led collaborative activities and caregiver-moderated routines at home. While the child dines on their pretend meal, they make choices about what food to eat, who is joining them, and what topics they are going to discuss. Everything about the play is based on the child’s growing awareness of their autonomy and their power to choose.

Language & empathy

Language development is a key component of early childhood dramatic play. It provides for a safe place to practice navigating challenging social situations using the language they are learning. Think about the words or phrases you might use during a pretend meal – the discussions, though often silly, happen as conversations, with back-and-forth dialogue that may not occur during other parts of the day.

A key aspect of dramatic play is that it helps children build empathy. As they take on characters outside themselves, children don’t just think about surface-level attributes, like clothing or occupation, but also how their character talks, thinks, what their needs are, and how they interact with others. Put simply, dramatic play allows children to “walk a mile” in a character’s shoes — sometimes, even literally. It’s powerful to try to imagine the world from someone else’s point of view, and dramatic play is a way that children practice it every day.

What can we do at home?

What makes an effective space for imaginative play? First and foremost, dramatic play centers need to be highly accessible. Dramatic play has two approaches: purely open-ended – that is, not defining a theme or identity for the space – or intentionally student-centered – meaning that the child directs the narrative environment. Regardless of which approach you take, there are a few things to consider as you create a dramatic play environment

• Is there adequate space and light?

• Do they have the ability to change the lighting through lamps, blinds, or flashlights?

• Is there room to build with blocks or other manipulatives?

• Is the space inviting to children?

A welcoming space can sometimes encourage children to play more meaningfully because they go there of their own volition.

Materials & symbolic play

If you are organizing a purely open-ended center, select a variety of tools that are both familiar and unfamiliar to the child. First and foremost, understand the value of symbolic play, and let that guide your selection of tools as well – a stick can be a hammer, a fork, a magic wand, or anything else your child imagines. This pretend play is so important, and we urge you to seek out items that can have multiple uses. For example, you can place pretend phones in your dramatic play centers — but your student may be just as likely to use a wooden block or a plastic banana to represent a phone as much as your old cordless. Otherwise, stuffed animals, clothing, recycled electronics, jewelry, plastic silverware, and other age-appropriate manipulatives are typical of this kind of center.

Follow the children

The second way we recommend encouraging dramatic play is by engaging children’s interests. If your family has been discussing whales or sharks, try out an underwater dramatic play center. If your children love learning about space, think about creating a rocket ship. Bottom line: Engage the interests unique to your child. This tactic is also effective if you notice that your children are less interested in their dramatic play center than they used to be. Maybe it’s time to move on from one idea and give them a purely open-ended space. Perhaps you let the children decide themselves! Variety is key.

Every group is different. In school, sometimes a class may love a particular dramatic play center for many weeks or even months; other times, a theme may only engage them for a few days. That’s why monitoring and interacting with children in these centers is important. But let your child stay in the driver’s seat. However you set up your space, remember that this center is a place for imagination. If the space-theme dramatic play you set up becomes a place to care for baby dolls, then that’s what it is today! Explore alongside your children and see where it takes you.