Dressing up is fun, and many students enjoy pretending to be someone else during play time. Whether they are pretending to be a mother to some dolls or saving the world as a pretend super hero, early childhood is a time of building foundational character traits and relationship skills. Read on and learn more about the benefits of dress up play in your early childhood classroom.
Developmental Impacts of Early Childhood Role Playing
Dressing as someone else allows students to put on a new outfit and take on the part of their imaginary character. Many young students enjoy being heroes and princesses, but there are benefits to dressing up as real-life characters such as doctors, firefighters, police officers, and even restaurant servers.
Foster Imagination
Helping to grow a child’s imagination is a benefit to building character and teaching them to learn in new ways. Students imagining to be someone else can experiment with role-playing in situations they don’t encounter in real life. They get to live out their imaginary stories while practicing roles such as a hero or villain, and see how those roles impact others.
Self-Exploration
Playing roles that represent real-life, such as being a doctor, can even help students to learn about themselves. Perhaps they pretend to be the doctor every time they play, learning that they enjoy helping people and being a leader. Students can imagine they are someone else, and in doing so learn more about what they like and don’t like, as well as how they prefer to interact with others.
Build Interpersonal Skills
Another benefit of dress up play is in building relationship skills with the other students. By “living” as someone else for a short time, they practice skills in empathy. This improves the overall understanding of other people’s feelings, and gives students a chance to really think about what motivates and affects others.
If you’d like to learn more about the importance and benefits of dramatic play, check out our other blog post: 5 Ideas for Dramatic Play in Early Childhood
Dress Up Play Kits Available Online
Students can dress up as just about any character they can imagine, but with the right tools, you can guide them to try out important community roles. Check out the dramatic play kits that are available at SchoolSpecialty.com.
