What really matters- Expressing Ideas (see Mental Models post)- As mentioned, pretend play is a great vehicle for our toddlers to express their understanding about aspects of their world. It is also a great way for us to see into those understandings. In the videos to the right Whitney reveals she has a explicit idea about feeding baby, cutting pears, mixing in a bowl and washing dishes and she can express her ideas through pretend play.

How to put it into practice-

My Experience-

Whitney showed she knew lots about the kitchen. She knew about the purpose of food and feeding someone (see Feeding Baby video). She knew you had to prepare a “lunch”. She obviously saw us cut her fruit and knew she needed a knife to cut it in half (see Cutting Fruit video). She even knew that the funny looking tool called a “mixer” was used in a bowl to stir things around. These mental representations were certainly not possible a year ago and reveal a growing awareness of events in her world and the memory to retrieve those events for pretend play.

It is also just as revealing to note what is not happening. Whitney’s representations or scripts are not the smooth overarching narrative an adult would display. They are isolated little islands-- pieces of the bigger narrative of preparing and serving a meal in the kitchen. These ideas are fragmented and happen in no logical sequence. The overall arch of the story and how all the pieces are connected are not there.

Tuning In-

Our 2 yr olds do not have the full awareness and planning capacities they will soon but are in the early process of building them. The props we have in our pretend play areas frequently solicit and determine what story fragments will come alive. Whitney had peanuts and fruit as a nearby prop; but if something else was there different stories would no doubt emerge. In the stories that do emerge it was fun to see where the understanding begins or ends. In the Feeding Baby video, we can see that whitney had a goal to feed baby. She placed a peanut in the hole of her doll’s mouth and when asked what else she was going to feed her, she announced “lunch”. It was not so clear that Whitney had a clear idea about what constitutes a quality lunch. She might have been happy to just make it peanuts or since a toy pear was sitting around it seemed peanuts and a pear would do. So Identifying where Whitney is helps to see where the support and “bridging” is needed.

Extending/Bridging-

In this episode of preparing a lunch, perhaps I could have done a better job of asking questions to see if whitney had the beginnings of the idea that a lunch or dinner has different components to it. She certainly had numerous experiences of getting a nice big sandwich as the main part with cut fruit and with nuts or other items as side dishes.How much of that did she understand or how could my descriptions or questions begin to help her reflect on and then bridge to those understandings. Or perhaps I could even probe the ideas of the broader narrative where first we have to prepare all the different food items (make sandwich, cut fruit, etc), then serve it on plates with silverware and napkins, then clean up and wash dishes after the meal.

My guess is pushing too much on the overall sequence would have been well beyond her developmental level. Whit would be best served by helping her elaborate her fragments of the story. For her the fruit cutting is a full episode unto itself and can be treated as such. It does not need to be tied to “preparation of the meal”. Again we want to start with where our toddler is and simply edge out with her ideas and the expressions of them.