Dr. Jefferey Trawick-Smith: Teachers often design their play centers based around children’s interests.
Some children need a little bit of support in order to play.
In these instances, teachers often choose to actually enter
the dramatic play area and play along with children.
One way to enhance children’s pretend play is to get children involved
in the planning of the play center and the play theme.
Often, teachers will engage children in creating props,
and thinking through how props and space should be arranged.
Amy Doyle: In my classroom, to decide a dramatic play center we involve the children
so we talked about what types of dramatic play centers they might like to have
and the children really geared toward a train station.
To determine their background knowledge on the train station
we started by webbing the topic together as a whole group and from that you can
really see which children have the knowledge
or which children are looking to their peers to help them out.
From this experience we learn that two children, out of the whole class,
have been to a train station before and had the experience of riding on a train,
whereas the rest of the children had no knowledge of that at all,
so from there we did the research on the computer and looked at the virtual field trip
so that the children could understand exactly what happens in a train station.
Our goal for this was for children to not only gain the knowledge of the train station,
some content knowledge of that, but it was also for them to work together
through the whole process and the children helped to create all the props
for that center; they created the train themselves, they created the cash register,
and the tickets, and the money that they would use there.
One child shared her whole experience with us when she went to get on the train
there was this big yellow area that she was not allowed to step on so she had to
stay behind it until the train came, and came to a stop.
And that really sunk in to another child and she realized that
we didn’t have a yellow space in the dramatic play center.
Amy: Explain to me again what they yellow tape means.
What does yellow mean next to the train?
Amy: Our dramatic play center was a good opportunity for me
to join the children and really scaffold and model
and show what appropriate things we could do there.
Amy: I am the customer and who are you going to be?
Amy: You are the cash register? I thought that this was the cash register.
Who are you?
Amy: A cashier?
Amy: After observing the children I learned to really
pay close attention to how we model the center
and what roles we really talk about.
Amy: And what’s Asia’s job?
Child: Asia’s job is to drive.
Amy: To drive the what?
Child: The train.
Amy: What is that called?
What are those people called that drive a train?
Amy: Children are still working on their cooperative play skills
so it’s really my job to step in and scaffold the children
or encourage the peer-to-peer interactions and there’s also
the emotional piece; there’s a problem is going to arise at some point.
Child: Wait, that’s my baby. I have to hold her.
Amy: Talk to her calmly.
Child: That’s my baby and I have to hold her.
Amy: I think she was just trying to help you. Notice the baby was by itself.
Amy: We always look for cooperative play and empathy and how they’re playing together.
Child 1: I should have brought extra clothes.
Child 2: I’ll go find you some extra clothes, okay?
Amy: In the center, there are so much social studies going on.
The children were buying tickets and they had the exchange
of money and they know all the responsibilities of each role.
They knew as a mother what their job was.
Child: Yeah that’s really far away, I’m going to have to take a stroller.
Amy: They knew as a cashier what their responsibilities were.
Child: It costs five dollars please.
Amy: Five dollars, do you know where I am going?
Amy: And there was a certain point where we needed a doctor.
Child 1: She’s the doctor.
Child 2: I work at the train station, what happened?
Amy: And they had the opportunity for so much symbolic representation
using the boxes as a train,
using the paper towel tube as a phone,
becoming the sounds of the alarm clock when it was someone to get up.
Amy: What is that noise?
Amy: Children learn through play, through hands on play,
so dramatic play is a great area for them to learn so many different things.