skill building

Content

What is Role Play

Chiefly, role-play needs at least 2 components, a role that is not your own and a task or situation. It can be solitary or with others to play through and in time to enjoy unlimited perspectives and places. Depending on the play, it can easily enhance skills, e.g. a child pretends to be a builder when using Lego bricks, learning about angles, or practicing parenting skills whilst looking after a teddy or pet, or a student imitates a famous sports commentator when writing a short stor

The act of role-play can live out dreams, aspirations, or visions, e.g. creating a mythical land to practice being a caring, responsive, and empathic person aka hero/heroine. The act of taking on a persona can help focus on a perspective to problem-solve, make choices, risk assess, and communicate through the lens of the persona.

As a little side note, it is easy to imagine role-play and improvisation as a spectrum. Role-play is conforming, mimicking, and mirroring the role and task. Improvisation is developing the role or task. The brilliance of viewing as a spectrum can help children deepen their experiences. Role-play to mirror, gaining the skills to move into improvisation, curiously stretching, bending, or possibly breaking conformities of the role or task all through the safety of play.

Why Use Role Play

“Logic will get you from A-Z; imagination will get you everywhere” Albert Einstein

Children learn by observing, repeating, and then experimenting. You can imagine Child development stages are like an intricate and strong spider web. The joy of role-playing is a child can weave their internal web by imitating the Prime Minister, someone homeless, a film star, a cleaner, a sheep, or even an elevator. Each role-play offers experiences to strengthen child development domains (physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and pro-social) so a child can reach their full potential. Experiential learning, through the lens of another, creates healthy internal and external debate. For example, how can we all behave to help a cleaner? When in a position of power, how do you make decisions for everyone?

Experiencing tasks (even if it is pretend), creates understanding and empathy. Other benefits of using role-play include,

• Explicitly fun, interactive, and motivating,
• Builds creativity, imagination, and instigation skills,
• In general, a safe way to test boundaries,
• Experimenting with social roles, learning to cooperate,
• It allows you to express your opinions and explore other people’s opinions,
• Develops memories that can be recalled in real-life situations like calling for help,
• Making sense of real-life situations, 
• Develops awareness and identity,
• Develops fine and gross motor skills; using finger and thumb to pinch and hold a stethoscope or crouching and jumping high when being a rocket shooting into space,
• Help application of subjects like mathematics by counting in a shop or building a tower bridge,
• Increases problem-solving skills such as using the materials in the role play. In other words, how to build a track for the ambulance to drive and help grandma,
• Learn to share responsibility,
• Develops decision-making skills,
• Builds relationships and cultivates friendships through communication skills,
• Improves self-confidence and flexibility,
• It’s the rehearsal, the practice of the next stages including becoming an adult

A Strong Benefit to Role-Play

Human behaviour is key to a compassionate, effective, and efficient society. Behaviours are ever-changing, for example, there are fewer opportunities to practice communication skills (social domain) as technology advances. Ordering food via an app, using social media sites, or buying online is quick, and efficient and needs no face-to-face interaction which is changing society behaviours.

Furthermore, communities require individuals to accept others to live peacefully (empathy and pro-social domain). Learning to healthily express feelings, needs, and wants by practicing the skills in real-world situations using role-play safely enables the brain to stretch its tolerance and remain calm, alert, and focused thus continuing to use executive function.

Recall a time when you noticed a great bit of negotiation. What helped? Listening, validating, and open to negotiation? What about when you have felt disrespected or let down and the person who was the culprit owned it and repaired the damage either by saying sorry or even better helping to make amends – how did you feel about that person? Learning to negotiate, and repair harm is experiential, the skills require practice and will help home life, school, and adulthood. Practicing the skills through role-play without genuine emotional responses develops neural pathways that can be utilised in actual events creating a healthy response to feelings.

How to Use Role Play

Allowing the possibilities of role-play also means letting inhibitions float away, and playfully engaging with role-play too. Role modelling role-play whilst being comfortable with children leading and exploring ideas to immerse in curiosity is liberating and shows empathy.  

There are some role-play ideas to use in school or at home, however, they are mere ideas and can be used as a catalyst to invent even better ideas. Curious questions in role-play can help if stuck, for example, “who is that coming around the corner?”, “It’s starting to rain, what can we do?” or “The giraffe is hungry, what can they eat?”

The role-play can be task orientated, for instance making a cuppa, cooking pizza, going on holiday, camping, creating gloop in a science lab, working in a doctor’s surgery, or running a café. Furthermore, each scenario or task can enable you to feed in terminology or language to extend a child’s vocabulary like “What is written on you menu”, “shall we go to Spain and speak Spanish” or “wash our hands to get rid of the germs”

Tips To Keep Role Play Going

Undoubtedly, try not to ‘Block’ the flow. In other words, try to keep the discussion and action flowing. To demonstrate, if I said it was raining and you said no it isn’t – this would be blocking. It halts and stops the flow. If I said it was raining and you said raining marshmallows, then you would be extending the play whilst taking it off in a different direction. Unless the character in the role play is supposed to block ideas for others to problem-solve the character who is blocking!

Role Play Ideas

Here as some games that can start role-play, practice dipping a toe in role-play or letting the tidal wave of role-play begin.

 What’s happening

Use pictures to imagine what could be happening. Children could search the internet for historical, adventurous, or family images. Weather can be linked to Geography or a battle linked to History. The role could be a storyteller or characters from the picture. It can have wild stories attached to what is happening. You can end with what is happening and ask which they like best, their version or the actual event. In brief, a low-energy activity with lots of creativity and imagination. There is a lot of fun to be had from telling and hearing the stories created from a picture. 

Time Machine

Draw or build a time machine to go on a trip (you may need a survival pack for the adventure). It could go anywhere. Help children who are anxious plan an actual trip in the role of parent, teacher, or travel agent. Relate the trip by using subjects such as Languages, History, Geography, and English to extend knowledge.

The time machine can incorporate a world of fantasy. Specifically, notice the details of the landscape, building, and people. What do they look, sound, and feel like? What do people wear or eat? How do they communicate? Are the buildings tree houses or caves or something in the future?

 Children truly love building time machines. Early years practitioners and parents may lead the adventure with toddlers. Even a superhero can make an appearance!

 Dragons Tail

 In short, this is one of the role-play ideas because it is very popular for under 10’s. It could be used when teaching or celebrating Chinese New Year. The dragon could mirror the personality of the dragon.

• Stand in a line and hold each other’s shoulder or waist (like the conga),
• State the line is now pretending to be a dragon. You could practice moving like a dragon whilst crawling, dancing, or protecting the adult,
• The person at the front of the line becomes Player A (or the adult could take this role to demonstrate),
• Player A faces the rest of the line; the dragon,
• The aim is for player A to tag the tail of the dragon. The rest of the dragon tries to stop player A, The head of the dragon who faces player A blocks them (without contact) whilst the rest of the dragon holds the line and runs away from player A,
• Everyone apart from player A must maintain holding shoulders or waist. If the dragon comes apart the games stops until the dragon line is back together,
• If player A tigs the tail, they join the end of the line, becoming the tail. The head of the dragon becomes player A,

It is great fun and burns a lot of energy. In between the chasing part of the game, the dragon can be asked to go for a walk, eat, drink, and even go for a nap. A conversation about teamwork would end the game nicely.  

Coat of Arms

Draw or design your coat of arms. Indeed, as a knight, you will need your coat of arms on the back of your chair (dining chair or sofa). You could include what you are good at, your best quality (are you caring and intelligent) hopes for this year, hopes in 5 years, a motto, a logo, and add your favourite colours. A family may already have a crest that you could add or adapt.

Once the coat of arms is completed, use it to role-play community cohesion and citizenship, by building a town/city. Set up a town/city meeting to explore what skills the coat of arms represents to contribute to a town/city.  How can the town/city be proud of all the coat of arms whilst accepting others? The role-play could include a celebration.

Survival Shelter

The task is for the children to plan or make a shelter to survive a bad storm (be sensitive to children’s experiences as this is not to trigger anyone). The shelter can be made or designed on paper for the children to use their imagination.

The adult could start the role-play by acting as the local councillor gathering a town meeting (you can link the same town as the coat of arms activity above) to tell them bad weather will come in 10 days, and they must respond together as a team. Plan what roles and tasks are required to survive. e.g. the architecture (a toilet is needed), the builder, and the scout’s collecting materials. Is there going to be a farm to feed the shelter?

Add another layer to the role-play by something happens e.g. someone gets chickenpox (or smallpox or influenza), and a doctor is needed, or an animal tries to eat the vegetables and the shelter will need to work out what to do before they go hungry (is there an engineer in the shelter?).  

Lastly, the role play can include lots of decision-making and problem-solving. The adult can have a few issues up their sleeves to move the play along, such as a drought, spiders have eaten the apples, or smelly socks are stinking the shelter out.

All Aboard the Bus

Create a bus and role-play the interactions between each other. A bus driver, mechanic, dad, grandma, teacher, grumpy person, or dentist could be on the bus. Surely, a dinosaur or cartoon character like Bluey can end up on the bus too 😁.  

Situations can create conversations like someone farted, £5 was lost…or stolen, music is too loud, someone’s tooth is hurting, there are no more seats, someone is hungry, or the dinosaur tail keeps hitting the bus driver.

The role-play may last 2 minutes due to attention spans or levels of imagination, or it can last 10 minutes. Either way, it’s entertaining and can be done anywhere.

You can add a safety element, such as talking to strangers, maintaining personal boundaries, or asking for help when you think a stranger/adult is unsafe.

Role Play and Healthy Behaviour Responses

To summarise, it’s good to consider that practicing social skills, through the lens of other roles builds empathy – a pro-social skill. This widens a window of tolerance and develops healthy ways to respond to feelings, needs, and wants.

Michelle x (I’m off to practice being a mum)