Lizzi Ogle – Tremont District Library 1 Early Literacy Tip Tuesday November 10th – Imitation and Imagination Hi everyone and welcome to another week of Early Literacy Tip Tuesdays. This week we are starting our discussion on the fifth of the five practices: Play. Each of the five practices are important, but I especially love Play. Play is different for every child and each developmental age group, but you can see how much joy it brings to every individual child and really watch them learn and grow from it. Let’s talk about a few of the benefits of Play for our early literacy learners. One of the first ones we can note is Fine and Gross Motor skill development. Remember the other activities we’ve talked about throughout this video series? Like doing a fingerplay along to a song or drawing on a large sheet of paper? These are activities designed to build certain skills, but they all boil down to just being play! Activities like these work on skills that prepare children for school without them even knowing. Play is instrumental to developing cognitive thinking skills, problem solving skills, storytelling skills, vocabulary, and so much more. Reenacting stories they have seen before with their own toys shows how their memory is developing and working. There are lots of great games designed to help build these skills, but unstructured play time provides just as many benefits to a child’s brain development. And social skills. Play is how children learn to interact with parents and caregivers, with each other, and how they learn how they themselves want to be treated. Introducing our children to others in a leisurely and comfortable environment helps them to learn how to make friends, overcome stranger anxiety, and experience different ways of life. We’ll talk more about play and social skills in our “Play is their Work” video for older toddler, ages 3-4, because this is when we really see those interactions happening the most. Lizzi Ogle – Tremont District Library 2 Along with an overview of the benefits of play, I also wanted to use this video to break play down into two categories before we delve into each age group in future videos, Imitation and Imagination. One of the first ways babies will start to interact with others through play is Imitation. One of the cutest things babies do, in my opinion, is repeat what other children or parents do. For example, playing peek-a-boo is an easy concept to pick up and babies will pick it up very quickly and learn how to play the game when encouraged by a caregiver. As children grow older, they love to pretend. They love to pretend they are different places and different people. Children like to play “mommy” or “daddy” and pretend to take care of a doll or stuffed animal. They see their parents and caregivers loving them and want to replicate that. Young children also love to pretend to be doctors, grocery store clerks, or firefighters because those people do such cool things in their eyes! While we might see some jobs as mundane, or just things that adults need to do, kids are seeing someone do something that they’ve never seen or heard of before. They say imitation is a form of flattery, and it definitely is. Children look up to older children and adults and they learn more about what they are doing by copying them. As children are growing older and imitating others in play, we will also start to see more imaginative play happening. Children use what they’ve learned so far and their developing storytelling skills to mix and match ideas and create their own. Toys that can be transformed into anything are great for expanding kids’ imaginative play skills. A simple box can be turned into a house or a car, and legos can be turned into a whole world. The reason I wanted to start our Play discussion by breaking it down into two categories, is because I feel like it simplifies it and helps us as parents observe it a bit better. Seeing how our child is playing, whether they’re pretending to be a doctor or Lizzi Ogle – Tremont District Library 3 creating a whole new world, helps us to know what questions to ask them and what additional information to give them. Younger children need and want more guidance as they play and learn about their world. Older toddlers and preschoolers are working social and storytelling skills and asking them questions about what they are doing helps them to expand their imagination. If you’re looking for general information about how play helps children develop, checkout the links in this video. Upcoming videos will include links to specific activities for each age group. In the next few weeks we’ll cover a few different age groups: babies (birth-12mo.), young toddlers (1-2), and older toddlers/preschoolers (3-4). We’ll go over what kind of play engages them the best, and other activities that help these skills develop. We’ll discuss ages and activities through the lens of imitation and imagination play and see how our children are developing their minds at each stage. Thank you all again for joining me for another Early Literacy Tip Tuesday. If you’re new to this series, you can find the rest of our videos on our Facebook, or on our website at tremontlibrary.com under the Virtual Children’s Programming tab. See you all next week! Sources: https://www.coloradovirtuallibrary.org/learning/literacy/the-5-early-literacy- practices-play/ https://static1.squarespace.com/static/531bd3f2e4b0a09d95833bfc/t/549643b3e 4b04b06d45b1729/1419133875331/ThePowerofPlay.pdf
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