After my own reading, observing, and thinking so much about the power of imaginative play in children’s development of self-regulation and the scaffolding of learning in early educational settings, I’ve inevitably been paying closer attention  to Lily (now 4.7) and Isaiah (now 9.10) at play on the home front. Lily never tires of pretending. Recently, she’s been Doctor Lily, providing a Nana-to-Papa blood transfusion with a roll of pink crepe paper, and the Bat Princess, danced dramatically at the end of one Sunday afternoon as the exhausted heroine fell to her demise.

Most of Lily’s home play, because there are no neighborhood children, is solo, and now, given her age and stage of development, devoted to many intricacies. For instance, as owner of her own bakery, she creates cardboard trays and paper cookies, carefully colored with frosting, carefully cut out and arranged for passing out to family customers. Awaiting the return of her mom from a night class, she can spend concentrated time creating tickets and programs for the show she’ll will put on when Mama returns, complete with her “written” programs (multiple copies mind you) as she explores her growing fascination with letters and words. Then out come the dress-ups, her choices depending on her fancy for the music or theme of the evening.

The photo of Lily in the red mask shows part of her preparation for an evening of theater, and it also gives hints of where Isaiah’s imagination has partially taken him . . . . into the land of books. Currently, we’ve finished reading together most of the Indian in the Cupboard series by Lynne Reid Banks and have just started tackling the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan.

Isaiah still engages in his own imaginative play, too. It’s strongly linked to themes of fighting and bravery as found in the books he’s reading. He pretend-fights with make-believe swords and toy guns and loves to go to friends’ houses where he can join in such play. He’s also taking classes in self-defense and learning true self-regulation of his physicality.

Isaiah also is of the developmental age where both his Pokemon and baseball cards provide an imaginative world for himself. The cards help him with self- and other-regulation, depending on whether he plays with them alone or with friends. Such “card play” enables Isaiah and his friends to build elaborate, if still imaginative, rules of their own to live by before being overtaken by adult rules of commerce and competition. This is a very useful stage of imagination for children to be able to maneuver through without an overabundance of adult intervention and worrying about how they are navigating this stage in their developing world of friendship.