Arts Explorer # 8 Pretend Play & Magical Thinking

What is Pretend Play?

According to Shipley D.(2008), Segal (2002), uses the work of McCune (1986) to describe five levels of pretend play between ten months and two years.  At level 3, children are engaged in decentred pretend when the child engages either alone or with another child in an activity that is usually performed by someone else, for example, feeding the doll in a high chair or rocking a teddy bear.  Level 4 pretend play involves enacting two or more different schemes in a realistic sequence as in undressing the doll, putting the doll in the bath water, drying, and then dressing the doll.  Level 5 shows more planning on the child's part as he relates what he intends to do and then reenacts a familiar event such as packing up the cart with the packsacks, food, and blankets to go on a camping trip, symbolically playing out an event that he has witnessed at home. 

Make Their Own Restaurant

• Mixing and stirring in the kitchen to prepare a meal for the child's restaurant.
  

  Use the kitchen for this game. Have the child draw menus and place mats for use at the pretend restaurant. Pull out safe kitchen utensils such as plastic mixing bowls and plastic whisks for your child to use. The child will take your order on a pad of paper. Use play dough or cut-out magazine pictures for the pretend food. Your child will prepare the meal with the utensils, then serve it in an apron. A cash register can also be used with pretend money for paying the bill.

Read more: Pretend Games for Kids | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/list_6741306_pretend-games-
kids.html#ixzz1HCVgUKkK

Seeing dentist is nervous, pretend play letting child develop their language ability and cope with some psychologist issue.

What does it mean by Magical Thinking?

According to Wikipadia, the free encyclopedia,  Magical thinking is causal reasoning that looks for correlation between acts or utterances and certain events. In religion, folk religion and superstition, the correlation posited is between religious ritual, such as prayer, sacrifice or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In clinical psychology, magical thinking is a condition that causes the patient to experience irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because they assume a correlation with their acts and threatening calamities.

Magical thinking includes all systems of magic, as it includes the idea of mental causation, i.e. the possibility of the mind having an effect on the physical world directly. In Jungian psychology, magical thinking is described in terms of synchronicity, an approach that looks not for causality but for meaning in the co-occurrence of certain events.

"Quasi-magical thinking" describes "cases in which people act as if they erroneously believe that their action influences the outcome, even though they do not really hold that belief"

How a wonderful picture!  It is a real man and a real sun.  After these two main elements mix together, it comes out not a real scene.  Use our imagination and observation in our daily life, there are many surprises products.

References

Shipley D. (2008), Empowering Children Play-Based Curriculum for Lifelong Learing, 4th Edition, Nelson Education Ltd.