Back to Basics – M is for Make Believe

M is for Make Believe

Back to Basics is back with the second half of the alphabet – today’s post is M is for Make Believe, call it role play, pretend, imaginative play it’s one part of childhood that is so much fun.

Role play

All children love to role play, whether they are being dad and doing some DIY around the house (fence painting), helping mum to hoover with the buggy or if you have a small play kitchen cooking up dinner just like mum and dad do role playing adult roles is fantastic fun.

Making small worlds

Is it those dinosaurs invading the garden or an undersea world making small worlds with their toys is part of childhood. I remember playing with Star Wars in our garden fighting off Darth Vadar whilst protecting the frog people from destruction using the rockery as a base camp. With small children we set up small world play to help them get started – our sand and water table this winter houses a quarry/building site for when we are playing outside, inside recently I have set up a farm using carpet tiles and coming soon is our under the sea world.

Dress up

Provide a selection of outfits, make your own, re-purpose your old clothes or even leave children to it and they will become what they want to be when they dress up in make believe play. Our dressing up box contains some old Halloween costumes, a DIY tutu, old dressing gown plus lots of things like old phones, play cameras, bags and jewellery. Red Ted Art has an easy King’s Costume to make which would be perfect to add to the dressing up box.

But they don’t need the costumes and things J and T recently spent a morning being super hero’s – their cape was a sweater with a hood and they used their arm to fly around the house chasing each other to possess the cape and be the super hero.

For even more inspiration on Dress up Play – Childhood Beckons has a complete series of posts on the matter.

Back to Basics is happily sponsored by Zulily.co.uk a fantastic company supplying kids essentials, stylish clothes (which I love and we get comments on all the time – T’s dress in the super hero play picture is one of our purchases), Toys, stylish clothes for yummy mummy’s and home décor and essentials.