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Actitives in Dramatic Play to Help Celebrate Spring

Dramatic play is one of the best ways to teach children under 8 years old who typically have a short attention span. Allowing these impressionable students to explore learning topics through play in the form of role-playing and thematically-organized games offers an opportunity to learn while having fun. One common theme for this kind of play is seasons. Spring, for example, is a season full of potential for dramatic play.
  1. Blooming Fun Dress-up

    • Set up a prop box full of clothing that is much too big for your kids. Encourage them to dress up as their favorite person and act out a movie role. Discuss growing with them and relate it to the growing of new plants in the spring. Help children comprehend that plants start as seeds that eventually grow into a beautiful plant. Explain to the children that they too start small but will grow through the seasons of life.

    Build a Hedge

    • Another fun dramatic play example involves building a spring hedge with your children. Have the strongest children in class line up on the ground on their hands and knees -- forming the base group. Create a wall by having a smaller group lay down on their sides on the backs of the base group. Talk with your students about how shrubs grow leaves and become fuller and stronger in the spring. Explain how a hedge is a habitat for many of the animals that reappear in the spring and have them role play as some of the animals who hide in hedges, such as mice and rabbits.

    Weather

    • Spring is a season of transition and extreme weather. Place noise-makers such as homemade drums and sticks to hit on boxes, enabling the kids to act out a thunderstorm. Bring plant-misting spray bottles and let the kids spray a few puffs at each other. Hole-punch a pile of white paper circles to have an unexpected snow and talk about how sometimes a late snow will kill flowers and delay leaves from growing.

    Spring cleaning

    • Buy feather dusters at your local dollar store. Gather paper towels and spray bottles with small amounts of water in them. Host a "spring clean up" in your room. Talk about unsafe things to clean such as electrical products such as radios and fragile items such as paper. Allow children to clean everything that is safe to clean. Tell them to consider areas that may not normally get cleaned such as under desks and the top of bookcases. Help them see that things often get dirty over the winter and need a good clean-up in the spring. Relate this play to personal hygiene.

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