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I am going to show you how I sometimes make it a point to teach some skills using pretend play. We have done a lot of play together that my child has gotten to a point of creating a scene by himself. This is my favorite part of pretend play because I get to see his imagination.
Executive functioning skills work together in a complex fashion during a play. But for simplicity sake, I am going to break down the play and try to name some skills involved.
Task Initiation:
My son explained his scene: he has some cars who must jump off the bucket, then slide and fall on the floor. The crane must pick them and dump them in the tray. God knows why, but let us just go with it.
He explained this scene on Monday night at 8 and it was time for him to go to bed. So, I immediately told him that the slide is closing in 5 mins and it opens tomorrow, I set the timer for 5 mins using Google voice. We agreed to play until the timer goes off.
Planning:
Just to understand what he had in his mind, I let him play once and quickly started pushing the cars off the bucket, pretended to pick them using a crane and dumped them in the tray. He paused and corrected me at every step and showed me how he had envisioned the play. My first instinct wants to say, this is silly and a waste of my time. But I called on to my patience for another 5 more mins and watched him.
Goal-directed persistence:
It was a simple exercise. I watched slowly tumble the cars off the bucket and let them slide down and fall near the crane. He then carried the cars carefully balancing them in the crane hook and moved them to the tray. It was strategic. Then I told him that I now know the game and we can play tomorrow. He agreed.
Organization:
We decided to put the toys away. I told him if we put them in their spots, we can get to them tomorrow without any missing (my trick worked here).
Time management/planning:
The next day when we started the play, I laid out the rules.
Timer is set for 15 mins.
I looked at the basket of cars and realized that it is going to take more than an hour to play with all the cars. So I quickly made a plan and said the cars that won’t fit in the bucket are disqualified.
The qualified cars can only go one time, if they go multiple times, they are disqualified and must go away.
Everybody gets a turn. (persistence)
All the qualifying cars must participate. (which means we finish what we started)
Response inhibition/Sustained attention:
We stayed focused till the end of the game insisting that every car should get a chance.
We had a blast tumbling the cars and watched how some cars rolled, some naturally slid, some got stuck, some were hard to balance in the crane hook. We had arguments over who is qualified and who is not. My son defended some of the cars here. There were a lot of problem-solving moments that increase their executive functioning skills
A simple task, lots of learning moments while having fun with mom/dad. This is what kids ask for.
