Dramatic Play at Home
The Importance of Dramatic Play
Exposing children to a wide variety of age appropriate, artistic, multicultural, and experiential learning environments can be beneficial in a variety of ways. Specifically, interactive theater is especially catered to meeting the needs of active and enthusiastic young children. When done properly, interactive theater can help a young child develop a better sense of self-concept, a stronger sense of empathy, a greater understanding of community, and can set the foundation for early language and literacy skills through new vocabulary and story development.
The Fairy Tale Players creates a safe and open-ended learning environment where young children can feel confident to experiment with the characters as they watch the story unfold. Through audience participation, children can find and express their voice in a unique and individualized way. Sharing a joke or special talent, children can feel assured and empowered through the guaranteed applause and positive reinforcement from both the actors and audience. We reward the courage and spirit of each child who comes up to share with us.
At The Fairy Tale Players, we always end each public performance with exploration of our costume trunk. This is possibly the most important part of our program. The sensory integration experienced through physically wearing parts of the story brings the entire experience to life in a concrete and tangible way. This is essential for young children, who struggle to see things as abstractly as their adult counterparts.
As we continue to grow as a company, we look forward to finding new learning opportunities to explore with your children. We hope you will join us in this journey.
Stephanie Morey Barry
Education Director
Dramatic Play Activities for School and Home
Activity: Emotion Motions
Ages: Suitable for all ages
Education: Using our entire bodies to express different emotions, how emotions influence how we move
How to Play: Children line up at one end of a room. Their challenge will be to cross the room while moving through five different emotions: Joy, Anger, Fear, Happiness, and Sadness. The instructor stands at the opposite side of the room and calls out an emotion, then turns their back to the children. The children must move and act as though they are overcome with whatever emotion the instructor has called out. When the instructor turns around, the children must freeze in a statue-like pose representing the emotion until the instructor calls out the next emotion and the process repeats. The game continues until all five emotions have been gone through.
Activity: Environments
Ages: Suitabe for all ages
Education: How does our environment affect our movement and physicality?
How to Play: The room is separated into four quadrants using masking tape or some other physical marker. The instructor demonstrates to the students the different environments that each quadrant represents: the desert, the tundra, the jungle, a temperate day. The students must walk around the room but must change their physicality depending on the climate quadrant they are in. Encourage the students to change quadrants often.
