How Role Play Can Help Children to Understand the World

8 min read

Last Modified 5 September 2024 First Added 21 August 2024

Kids have an incredible knack for imaginative play, and role play can tap into that uncanny ability and help your little one learn important lessons. Role play is more than just a game. It helps your child to develop skills and teaches them about the world around them; it is an important learning aid that can be utilised.

What is Role Play?

Role play assumes different roles and acts out various scenarios. These can be real-life scenarios or imagined ones. During the activity, children can use their imagination and creativity to bring the roles to life, using their bodies, voices, and actions to interact with others. This can be done with costumes and props or be fully within the imagination.

Benefits of Role Play for Children

Role play has several benefits for children and can help them develop various skills. For young children, it can help with various aspects of the EYFS framework. No matter your child’s age, role play can help their learning and development. Some benefits include:

Creativity

By engaging in pretend play, your child will develop their imagination and creative thinking. Role play gets your little one to invent different scenarios and explore endless possibilities, developing storytelling abilities and encouraging them to think outside the box. All of this fuels their creativity.

Social and Emotional Development

As your child explores different scenarios within their role-playing game, they are given a safe space to explore their emotions. Role play allows children to look at situations from different perspectives, explore various emotions, and discover different social dynamics. For different scenarios, your child must collaborate and compromise, listen to others, and understand another’s perspective.

When looking at scenarios from different perspectives, your child will develop empathy, which is an important part of early learning.

Another emotional and social benefit of role play is that it gives children a safe space to work through and talk about their emotions. Externalising their experiences and emotions can help them navigate more challenging situations and emotions they may encounter in the future, preparing them by letting them explore these situations in a safe place.

Cognitive Development

Role play stimulates your child to think, problem-solve and make decisions. All of this has a beneficial impact on their cognitive development. This helps them to learn how to navigate social situations and anticipate consequences. It also helps them to work out how to overcome challenges and even resolve conflict.

Provides a Fun Way to Learn Other Subjects

One benefit of role play is that it allows your child to learn other skills in a fun way, especially for young children. For instance, it can aid with learning literacy skills. To help with this, why not role-play a school and have your child as the teacher writing on the blackboard? They’ll be improving their literacy without even realising it.

Maths is another area where role play can make learning fun. Play shop and have your child add up what the purchases cost and give you change. Or you could play at baking and have your child come up with the measurements needed.

Critical Thinking

Use role play to develop your little one’s critical thinking abilities. During role-play, you can introduce your child to circumstances and obstacles that they have not come across before. This allows them to analyse the issue and come up with solutions. To do this, they will have to be resourceful and learn to adapt to changing situations – all important skills to learn.

Communication

Different scenarios call for different methods of communication, and role play can help with this skill. When acting out different situations, your child will have to interact with others in a way they normally wouldn’t. Whether this is simply pretending to order a meal or negotiating with pirates to share the treasure, your child will learn how to express their thoughts and emotions.

Role play can help with communication beyond language though. You could have a situation where you have to communicate via writing, for example.

Two children roleplaying

Using Role Play to Understand the World

Although role play can take your child to far-off worlds and fantasy adventures, the more mundane, real-world ideas can teach your child a lot about the world around them (and it isn’t a mundane scenario for them to play). Occupational role play is a great way to use this game as a way to teach your child about the world we live in. Here are some of our favourite occupational role-plays:

  • Grocery Store: Set up a grocery store with food items and take it in turns to be the customer and store worker. This will help your child learn to plan, write shopping lists, interact with other people and try some basic maths. Get started with our play shop toys.
  • Cafe: Take turns to be the customer and waiter, and play at ordering at a café. You could get your child to write pretend menus and ask questions about the menu items. This will also help with learning how to interact with people and have a go at using money.
  • Library: Gather books from around the home and set up a library. Decide whether your books are going to be arranged alphabetically or fiction and non-fiction, etc. You could also take turns being the visitor and librarian, where the visitor can ask questions and even order books that aren’t “in stock”. This can help teach your child literary and communication skills, as well as encourage an interest in books.
  • Fire Service: Teach your child about the emergency services with role play. Don’t forget to get the right uniform from our emergency services dress-up. You could work together to “put out” an imaginary fire and save those that need rescuing. This can help with problem-solving and critical thinking as they have to decide what to do to help with this pretend emergency. You can also use this opportunity to teach your little one how to make 999 calls and what to do if there is an emergency.
  • Home Activities: Playing house can make cleaning and tidying fun for your child and help them to learn the importance of these tasks. Ask them how they would clean certain areas and get them thinking about what would happen if their clothes weren’t regularly cleaned. You could role-play at making dinner, getting your little one to measure out the pretend ingredients and work out how much you need of each. Use old equipment and utensils you no longer use or find what you need in our home roleplay range.
  • Shoe Shop: Take it in turns to be the customer and the store assistant when you role-play a shoe shop. When you’re the customer, get your child to measure your feet to develop their math skills, and get them to help find a shoe that fits. When they’re the customer get them to explain the type of shoe they want, helping with their communication skills.
  • Builder: Work together with your little one to design and build something. You can use toy tool sets for imaginary building work or lego to build what you need. Working together will help develop their communication skills and teamwork.
  • Vet: Playing vets is a great way to develop empathy, communication, and problem-solving skills. Take it in turns to be the vet and the pet owner, with the pet owner describing what is wrong with their pet and the vet deducing what is wrong and how to make the pet better.

Tips for Encouraging Role Play

You can easily encourage your little one to take part in role-play and join in with their game. Get started by:

  • Creating a dedicated role-play area: Set up a space where you and your little one can role-play without interruption. In this space have your props and toys for role-play, ready for when you want to play! Take a look at our fancy dress and role-play range for inspiration and equipment.
  • Letting your child lead: Allow your child to choose the role-playing game and have a leading role. Have them decide what role they want to play and let them decide what props or outfits are needed for the situation.
  • Being an active participant: Take on various roles within the roleplaying game and encourage dialogue between the characters of the game. Dress up and use props, and be sure to ask open-ended questions when playing.

Find out how other activities can help your child develop and parenting tips on our Childhood Adventures blog.

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