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ICAN
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Visualizing. Storytelling. Imagining.
Imagination is an essential component of childhood, helping children learn many important lifelong skills. Most children can pick up an ordinary object — a box or a piece of cloth — and see its potential for a fort or superhero cape, spending hours pretending and role-playing. These seemingly simple interactions are crucial for a child’s development, giving them the creativity and problem-solving abilities they’ll need as adults. This type of play should be encouraged as much as possible to give kids the opportunities to grow, learn, and imagine.
Imaginative Play
Imaginative play is when children use their imaginations and play without rules or structure. Also called pretend play, dramatic play, and make-believe, imaginative play is an essential part of any childhood and introduces the concept of role-playing. This type of playtime helps kids make sense of their world by practicing skills and interactions they observe in the real world. It can help everything from decision-making skills to behavior and social skills.
Any time a child is pretending to be someone or something else, or playing with an object and pretending it’s something else, they’re engaging in imaginative play. It could be playing house with their dolls, driving toy cars around a tiny town, building characters out of legos, and so much more. But imaginative play doesn’t need to have specific props or fancy toys, either. Sometimes the best imaginative play occurs with free or repurposed items. What kid doesn’t love making a blanket fort with chairs and a sheet? Or turning a giant cardboard box into a house, a boat, or a rocket ship?
With this open-ended, unstructured play, kids can be anything they want, whether it’s a chef at a restaurant, a race car driver, astronaut, princess, knight, or an animal. There’s no limit to what a child can dream up. They can pretend to save the world, be mythical creatures, or act out scenarios they observe in their everyday life, mimicking parents, teachers, or grocery store clerks. Whatever they choose to play and pretend, they’re learning and developing important lifelong skills.
Here in ICAN, Imagination is Important in Child Development. And this happens through these steps:
visualizing - storytelling - imagining
Why Is Imagination Important?
Imagination aids in the development of social, emotional, creative, physical, lingual, and problem-solving skills in children. These are important skills to develop in early childhood, as they can be good markers for understanding a child’s overall development. But mostly, playing pretend is fun for kids. Learn more about how it supports many different aspects of child development:
Social and emotional development:
When kids play pretend, role-playing as other characters, they practice what it’s like to be someone else, helping them develop empathy and understanding for others. Pretending also helps a child’s self-esteem, giving them the confidence to be anything they want. When children play pretend with others, they work on skills like cooperation, negotiation, collaboration, and sharing of responsibilities. Pretend play is a great way for children to test their boundaries, learn to control impulses and experiment with social interaction.
Creative development:
Perhaps one of the most obvious benefits of imaginative play is an enhanced creative ability. Imaginative play gives kids the skills they need later in life for creative problem solving and an appreciation for artistic endeavors. Creativity in children can later aid in the discovery and invention of new things, as well as being able to understand various types of art and visualize characters and situations from books and movies.
Physical development:
Many types of creative play are also great opportunities for kids to be active and get exercise. And for younger children still working on motor skills, imaginative play can give lots of practice for both gross and fine motor skills. As children play, they use gross motor skills, like climbing and jumping, as they pretend to be animals, superheroes, and more. Fine motor skills come into play with pretend money and coins, play food, dressing dolls with clothes, and playing with small cars or figurines. Pretend play also helps young children learn to self-regulate their movements and behaviors.
Language development and communication skills:
Engaging in imaginative play allows children to act out situations they see every day or imagine from fairy tales. They may impersonate parents, other people they see, or characters from movies. And when they do this, kids experiment with language and vocabulary, learning how to use words appropriately and communicate with peers. They practice listening skills and learn the meaning behind words, strengthening connections between written and spoken words, too.
Thinking and problem solving:
All sorts of creative problem-solving abilities are applicable during imaginative play. It could be selecting materials to build a fort, or creating something new from common household materials. It also involves problems that may arise during playtime, such as two children wanting the same role or something going wrong in their pretend scenario. All of these examples and more are ways that a child can develop the cognitive abilities and skills they’ll use throughout life.
Visualize
OBJECTS and BACKGROUND
MOTION
MOVIE
Read, draw and write
The three components of VISUALIZING
The first step of developing of a great imagination is TO GET THROUGH how to visualize the thing they are reading. They learn this from the process of read-draw-write.
OBJECTS AND BACKGROUND
Students learn from objects first , and then learn the scene of objects associated with the background.
Imagination doesn’t cost a cent. Simple household objects can make cheap, low-fuss toys that can help your child learn about the world around them.
So exploring and understanding shapes, and noticing how things are similar and different in fun and playful ways is an essential stepping stone for little ones.
MOTION
Next , they learn motion scene with those.
Motor imagery is a cognitive process in which a subject imagines that he=she performs a movement without actually performing the movement and without even tensing the muscles. It is a dynamic state during which the representation of a specific motor action is internally activated without any motor output.
MOVIE
The scene is then created into a bigger story just like a movie!
Making movies in the head is an essential part of the human behavior for patterns matching, cognitive learning, and learning new things.
