Drama Resources for Schools

Role Play

Role play – being able to become someone or something else comes quite naturally to most children from an early age. It is a vital activity for children, stimulating their imagination and enhancing their social development – encouraging friendship through cooperation, listening and turn taking. It can improve their language and movement skills and can help them to understand different points of view, go into the future or the past, and travel anywhere in the world and beyond. Through role play we can explore moral issues and problems safely.

Literacy, numeracy and other curriculum activities can all be planned as part of a role play situation. Here is an idea to get you started:

Shops

Children do love playing shop so why not use that to your advantage? There are endless varieties of shop that can be explored and utilised to encompass any aspects of the curriculum. One of the most obvious ways is using the shops to teach about money, but why stop there? Why not have a garden shop in the spring term where the children can design seed packets, make paper flowers to sell, as well as discussing safety issues in a garden? A beach shop in the summer to link into work about the sea, where you can design postcards, think up new and wonderful ice creams, count shells, think about how and why wet sand is better than dry sand when making sandcastles.

Do contact us if you would like any more information or ideas on how to use role play with your class or if you would like us to come in and run a drama workshop.

We use role play in many of our drama workshops for more details click here