Paddy, who is going to be four this December, is really going through a development in his imagination. He comes up to me, “Mama, I’m a kitty. You’re the mama kitty. Miaow!” Being a kitty seems to be a recurrent activity, rounding out his traditional “fighting” games where he takes two Guys (who might be anything in the world, from fruit snacks to legos to sticks) and makes them fight with each other.
The other day, while I was washing the dishes, I found myself dialoguing with him the whole Three Little Kittens story. I was the mama ” What? Washed your mittens, you darling kittens” and he was the three little ones. “Purr, purr, purr, we may have some pie.” I think I will count this as his first narration, and a creative one, too.
He tells us about his imaginary friends — he has four of them, but one seems to be his more constant playmate. This friend is called “Betty” but in spite of the name, is a boy. They swordfight together, and share the same food. His other friends are called Shadow, Nova, and Klunkel.
Here is a short article about the Power of Pretend Play and its aid to development.
Here’s a blogpost about imaginary play.
A slight negative article about imaginary friends and a more positive one.
If you’ve read either Anne of Green Gables or Calvin and Hobbes, you can see that it seems to be of the nature of smart, verbal, perhaps slightly lonely children to have an imaginary friend.
I think possibly Paddy is a bit lonely. He is certainly surrounded by people all the time, and he does get to see peers regularly, but he is my most extroverted child. Aidan is developmentally close to him in age, but Aidan’s play patterns are less social than Paddy’s, and the two don’t seem to play together very often.
Aidan has advanced in his imaginary play, too, though. Yesterday he dressed his sleeping bag roll in his favorite shirt and spent a couple of hours carrying it around and talking to it. He weighed it on our scale, etc. His pretend play is very concrete. Partly I think because of his domestic, practical temperament — he is much more involved in the day to day nitty-gritty of life than any of my other kids. Also partly because of his difficulties with abstract thinking and conceptualizing. An example of this came up in his first speech therapy of the new school year, last week. He has identified features on a face for several years, and gave himself an intensive course in memorizing features on his Pikachu pillow, when he was about four. He’d lovingly sing out each feature “Pika’s nose; Pika’s mouth; Pika’s eyes” every night when he was going to sleep.
Yet, faced with a blank oval and asked to draw eyes and so on, he was random. We will work on that and hopefully it will develop his observational or generalization abilities, not just be an isolated splinter skill.
Both Aidan and Paddy are at the stage where they want to hear simple stories and rhymes over and over again, and can recite or “read” books with great delight or in Paddy’s case, dramatize them. Aidan proudly read me several simple board books the other day. He’s not reading, but it is an important pre-reading milestone. Growing without Schooling has a lot of anecdotes about small children moving from the memorized book stage to actually sounding out. Aidan may need a little help, but he is definitely moving along the right track.
