If you have a 16 year old at home, you are very familiar with the terms “Drama Queen” and “Drama King,” and my guess is that you do whatever you can to minimize their constant drama. In early years, however, we celebrate drama. When children talk to each other, give voices to toys, play pretend (by going to the doctor, school, or restaurant, or by acting like they are cooking or cleaning at home), play with puppets, pretend to be animals in a jungle, role play characters in their favorite story, or imitate adults, they are participating in dramatic and social play, which is essential for their development.

My children and I spent a lot of time cutting when they were young. Their favorite activity was to roll out long snakes of playdough and then use their safety scissors to snip small bits of playdough that they would later roll and wrap in gift paper and tie off with small rubber bands to sell as sweets in their role play sweet shop. They also cut lots of scraps of paper. I would draw small straight and wiggly lines on leftover scraps of paper from around the house and store them all in a plastic box for quiet moments of cutting fun. Those quiet moments were a God send because I often managed to get dinner cooked or some papers graded or a lesson planned while my children cut merrily away.

As my children played and grew, I think I built over 100 tumbling towers, brick buildings, basic bridges, and fighting forts. We had one large tub of Lego, but it lasted through three children and countless hours of building fun. When my girls were really young, sometimes we would just ‘dump out the blocks’ and ‘toss them back into the tub,’ and that two-step activity alone was engaging. Once we moved on to actually building things, our imaginations opened to a whole new world of construction projects, and we built a foundation of learning block by block.