Symbolic play nurtures young children’s social and cognitive development. During this type of play children share their ideas with others and create narratvives as they play, using their bodies, materials and the environment around them. It is important for children to develop a range of literacies, not just reading and writing, and therefore opportunities to imitate and mimic others, represent things from their imagination with objects and role play are vital for this.
Imitation
Imitation is a form of symbolic play, and begins from birth. In order to instigate social interaction, babies and toddlers carefully observe adults and try to copy what they are doing. They absorb what adults do in their environment and will replicate these actions through their play - both developing their understanding of the world, and their social skills.
Ways you can support imitation:
mirror and copy your baby's movements and speech sounds
babble back when they babble to you
blow kisses and raspberries
copy your baby's movements
use actions when singing songs
maintain eye-contact with them
encourage 'joining in' with repetitive refrains in books and songs
encourage them to copy animal sounds you make when pointing to a picture
Mimicking
Imitation can lead to mimicking, where your child demonstrates autonomy - making a choice for themselves to copy and do an action, or say something, that they've seen or heard be done before.
Early mimicking might look like:
returning books to the book shelf once finished reading
doing the actions from songs and rhymes
doing what a character from a book/tv show does
Representation A significant point of a child's literacy journey is when they are able to use objects to represent something else eg. a wooden block as a phone. This is because written language itself is symbolic - sounds form words, which create meaning between reader and writer! You can support representative play by:
offering open-ended materials, both indoors and outdoors
model 'pretending' that items are other things
offer opportunities for mark making with a range of mediums, both outdoors and indoors
role playing alongside them, pretending to serve food to animals/ cook up a recipe etc.
As you can probably now see, representaional play is closely tied with imaginative play and storytelling, all of which lead to early reading and writing, and what I'll share more about in Part 2 of this Blog Post!
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