The performing smarts! Getting creative in our role play!

This half term my team and I have created a performance space within our room. It was following our observations of how much our children love to dress up, sing, dance and perform. Opportunities to observe children in this area is always a joy to see but can be limited if the environment doesn’t allow or provide these experiences. Using all free and donated items our ‘performance area’ was born! Staff members asked for donations via local selling pages on Facebook and eureka - we acquired a keyboard, paper jam rock guitar, battery guitar with effects and ....a violin!!! We also managed to talk nicely with our site manager who found us a sturdy pallet complete with platform. A quick visit on Amazon completed the area using silver glitter curtains and some additional laminated stars and pictures, along with the dressing-up box, saw a quick and effortless transformational area of the room.

Watching the children explore, gasp and experience instruments that aren’t necessarily found in the school percussion box was mesmerising and hilarious all at the same time! One particular child whom struggles with controlling behaviour cane alive and instantly reached for the violin - eek! However they showed such skill and determination in working out how it was to be held and played that the end performance was pretty good complete with tongue hanging out for concentration purposes!

It’s so important to tune into our children and take inspiration from what they seek for enjoyment. The aim is to get a CD player complete with a selection of different music genres and let the children create their own performances independently.

We easily could have gone with a Chinese restaurant or a ‘shop’ role play area which would have been less engaging to the children and largely would have resulted in the same type of play being carried out. However, we wanted to challenge children’s thinking, allow creativity and let our children shine! 

Who doesn’t love a ticketed performance?! Pass the popcorn!