Playing Dress Up!

Treat-or-treat! Here are some of our Halloween visitors to Musikandmotion: Julia in her pink bunny costume, Karley as a ladybug, Lorenzo as a pumpkin, Danelle as a butterfly, and Aubrey as a blue butterfly princess!

If your child loved dressing up on Halloween night, she was doing a lot more than just putting her costume on. She was actively engaging in an important child development activity called "pretend play." Children who engage in pretend play are developing important thinking and creative skills. Pretend play helps children plan and organize events, solve problems, incorporate new vocabularies, tap their imagination, and develop a greater sense of empathy toward others. In addtion, "when children pretend, they manipulate... events and actions, which gives them a sense of competence, an important ingredient in mental health," Kostelnik, Stein, Whiren and Soderman of Guiding Children's Social Development.

So the next time your children want to play dress up, ask them if you can enter their pretend world and play along! Designate a special place where your children can go and play dress up using a variey of costumes and props! Don't forget to "scaffold" the pretend play just as you would in class during our musical exploration time. Incorporate new words, scaffold concepts and suggest positive play themes! Have fun playing dress up!

Musically, Miss Sunny
www.musikandmotion.com