Role-playing literacy
Sue Marshall

Organised role play in the early years can encourage children to explore unfamiliar language from different true-to-life scenarios. Sue Marshall, head of Oak House Nursery School, explains the importance of role play and how her new film resources can provide support.

To become literate a child first needs to hear words and phrases spoken, then have reason to speak them, before beginning to think about writing them down on paper.

As children love to play, role play has the potential to provide the ultimate reason for children to learn to speak, read and write new words and phrases. With each new role-play scenario comes a wealth of vocabulary and terminology not otherwise heard in early years settings.

While practitioners acknowledge the value of young children learning through play, the difficulty in introducing new role-play scenarios leads many settings to retain their trusted 'home corners'. All children have experience of home-life, have witnessed the roles their parents and carers take and are, therefore, able to replicate these roles in a meaningful manner. It is very different when the "home corner" becomes, say "the optician's" and children are asked to adopt the roles of adults they have not seen and use vocabulary and terminology they have not heard.

Despite sensitive adult support young children's role play rarely develops to its full potential. Perhaps there is a need for clear assessment of the gaps in the children's knowledge of a new scenario and the need to remember how differently the world appears to a young child.

Worcestershire Primary Inspector, Shelia Sage, once told me, "If we are to be children's expert play partners then we must provide them with the language, experiences and images of quality role-play scenarios"

So often children do not fully understand what adults mean. Take the little girl who was told by her Mummy that they were going on an aeroplane and became increasingly upset, begging, "Mummy, please can we go in the aeroplane 'cos we might fall off".

Whilst accepting the enormous potential of varied role-play environments, I felt unable to effectively fill those gaps in the children's knowledge with outings not always possible and non-fictional resources so limited. How can children be expected to realistically re-enact a visit to the vet's from hearing the story about Topsy and Tim's visit?

As I wanted so much to be able to bring the real world into our settings, I created Early Vision, to help Practitioners to show young children real examples of the 'locations' and 'scenarios' they were planning to role-play.

I commissioned a professional film crew to take quality film footage of real-life locations that are suitable for role-play scenarios. Our little films provide young children with an on-screen visit to a true-life situation showing them the roles people take, and the environment and procedures they follow.

With this information they are able to plan their own role-play area and identify the roles, notices and props that they will need. Planning becomes a whole group activity as everyone contributes ideas both from personal experiences and from what they have seen in the film. Children take ownership of their new role-play area resulting in a wealth of child initiated ideas and activities as they suggest what to do, use, make and bring in from home.

With this knowledge they are able to create their own 'area' and bring their understanding through to raise the quality of their actual role play, which becomes meaningful and life-like. They are able to adopt roles, use the words and phrases they have heard spoken, and carry out tasks and procedures they have witnessed with confidence and purpose.

Reticent children become empowered to take on new roles when equipped with a bank of phrases they have heard spoken by, say, a police officer, when apprehending a speeding motorist, or a receptionist when answering the telephone. A child, in the role of a doctor or vet, is not only provided with the context in which to ask certain questions but also given the reason to listen to the replies - to know which paw to bandage or which eye to look in.

As children witness the role models scribing for a purpose, they feel more confident to attempt their own "mark making" recognising the need to "write" down the name and address of the speeding motorist, the food order at the café, or the appointment at the dentist's, for how otherwise will the systems work? The added bonus of using film footage is that it can, of course, be re-visited several times, providing re-enforcement for young children, as practitioners encourage them to focus on specific aspects of the scenario.

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