Children mainly learn and develop their imagination, creativity and communication skills through playing with toys. After all you can’t expect them to learn things consciously like adults. Pretend play is a kind of playing for children to participate in a certain scene and create special fun by themselves.

Actually, pretend play is a game for children with a long history since human civilization. In the time without electronics and technological activities, kids had few toys to play so they need to try their best to think and create playing fun beyond their imagination. They even made their pretend play sets with their hands. However, in the modern society parents start to replace pretend play with computer games and gadgets. In fact, the make-believe activities are what stimulate children’s skills and abilities.

Importance of Pretend Play

Modern children’s childhood are full of electronic toys and computer games. We have to admit that technological activities can easily attract children to the designed scenes and put themselves into others’ shoes. But all the stories and plots are designed by the inventors of the computer games. So the players of the games are led and limited by the game designers. Only with the handy toys and playmates in the real life can children blend in certain scenes and learn to solve problems by themselves. Pretend playing can achieve that purpose when children play with fun. Meanwhile they gain many skills unconsciously during the playing.

Language Skills

Pretend play games require children to tell stories and create communication with others. When kids are at about 3 years old, they start to mimic words and phrases to themselves, some of which even can’t be understood by their parents. During pretend play, they can learn many new vocabularies from the parts of the whole set toys. Moreover, by touching and imitating how to use them, they can have a clearer concept to the vocabularies and the corresponding items. When adults offer some guidance to them on organizing a dialogue or teach them how to reply to others, they can have an advanced grammar sense even they don’t know the rules at all because of kids’ specially developed language learning nervous system. Gradually you’ll find your children have become talkative. That’s pretend play’s good feedback on them.

Social Skills

Whether playing with a real playmate, or an imaginary character, children need to consider others’ needs and thoughts. It can help to build up children’s understanding, empathy and thoughtfulness. Besides, interaction with others need proper pace. By mocking some similar situations, outgoing children will be reminded of proper boundaries while shy children can have the courage to have more interactions.

Problem-solving Skills

There must be problems occurring while mocking the real life scenes. For instance, when children play kitchen sets, the finished dishes drop on the floor and create a mess; or suddenly oil bottle is lost… Children can realize that accidents are everywhere so we should try our best to prevent them from happening.

Healthy Fun

OK, after talking about piles of skills that pretend play can bring to children, we should not forget the initial purpose of toys are just for fun. When adults feel tired about the stress of real life, they’ll choose playing video games to control the intangible world to relax. Kids have little control about their real life, but in pretend play games, they can control everything they want. That’s the true fun of pretend play actually.

Pretend Play at Crazy Sales

Kitchen Play Sets

Kitchen is obviously where most kids have fun, but it’s unlikely to let them play in kitchens for the sake of safety. Toy kitchen sets can achieve every child’s dream of being a chef. We have different kitchen play sets of different sizes and designs. If you want a simple set for toddlers, Pretend Play Fast Food Kitchen Centre is a good choice with little pots, cultery, food, utensils, an oven and more. For older children, we‘d like to recommend our Large Chef Kitchen by Vilac, which is more complicated and has more accessories. Some of kids may hope for a food-stand like kitchen play sets, you can buy them the set with a shade over the kitchen. They can pretending cooking and selling food to passers-by, making kitchen pretend play more interesting.

Some of our wooden play kitchens are popular as well. There’re different sizes including 7 pieces, 8 pieces and 11 pieces types. They don’t look like “toys” so much but similar to our real kitchens.

Supermarket Play Sets

Pretending buyers and sales persons is the most interesting way to train kids’ basic shopping skills. Kids Supermarket Play Set features a scanner, food, a cash register, coins and cash. This toy set is the perfect tool for your child to experience shopping for the groceries, being a check out chick, using money and generally to learn about the realities of everyday life in a fun and engaging way. Supermarket Pretend Play Set - Red White is a set with a shopping cart, which offers more authentic shopping experience to your kids.

Make-up Table Play Sets

Are you often afraid that your little daughters use your cosmetics or break your lotion bottles secretly? Buy her a make-up table toy set can get her engaged in her own heaven of dressing herself. Girl's Make Up Vanity Table Play Set with Music and Light is a set of make-up table and accessories for little girls. With music and light your kids can enjoy the dressing process very much. It can be a great gift for little girls according to many parents' reviews.

Tool Play Sets

Want your boy to be an intelligent handy man? Maybe you need to train him since childhood. Buy him a set of toy tools can get rid of the worries of safety problems. Children's DIY Workbench & Tools, Klein Bosch Mini Workbench Deluxe Set are both tool sets for kids with high quality. Some previous buyers leave a review that he didn't realize it's toys.