Living With Your Preschooler's Imagination

Preschool children quickly and easily grasp abstract thinking. They engage in a lot of imaginative play.

This is very important in numerous ways including:

1.Children who engage in imaginative play or have fairy tales read to them have a better vocabulary.

2.Being imaginative helps your child be powerful and in control in unfamiliar and scary situations.

3.When your child joins in imaginative activities with other children they are all learning social interaction, how to share and how to resolve conflicts.

4.By creating imaginary situations children are able to be more resourceful in solving problems as adults.

As you can clearly see, imagination is a very good thing for preschoolers to have, so you may be wondering how you can encourage it. Here are some ideas:

1.Spend time reading picture books together. This will encourage your child's imagination while increasing their vocabulary.

2.Creating new stories together will help your child's creativity and expand their sense of self.

3.Provide your child with various craft materials to experiment with then ask your child to tell you about what they made.

4.Make music with your child. Listen to different types of music together. Encourage dancing and using either homemade or toy instruments.

5.Encourage pretend play, as this will help your child develop social and verbal skills while working with different emotions. It also helps your preschooler to develop their understanding of cause and effect.

6.Give your preschooler a variety of props and a special place to keep them. Change these items frequently.

7.Only allow your preschooler to spend a limited amount of time on the computer or watching TV and movies because too much of these things will limit your child's imagination. When they do participate in these activities, participate with them so that you can ask questions, expand upon the ideas that are presented and find out what your child is really interested in.

Now once you do these things you will find that you will have to live with your preschooler's imagination. Here are some ways to do this:

1.Place reasonable limits upon your child's imagination.

2.At some point most children will have an imaginary friend. This is how creative imaginative children manage their own fears and concerns, so you should accept this friend. However, if your child is blaming this friend for their behavior, do not tell them that they are lying, but do let them both know that their behavior was unacceptable.

3.Try to specify a craft corner so that the mess is manageable. In this corner, keep a smock for your child and place plastic under their play doh table and butcher paper over their craft table.

4.Take time to enjoy these things, especially since it really is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.