Much of children’s worlds are imagined. Children pretend they are adults, driving cars, shopping for groceries, and taking care of babies. Children pretend they are animals, romping around on all fours and jumping up and down. While children’s pretend play may seem trivial to adults, this play is quite sophisticated, enabling children to learn about themselves and the world around them.
But, why do children choose to pretend, anyway? What are they getting from it? Well, of course, pretending is fun. But there’s more: while pretending, children can feel skilled, important, grown-up, and powerful. They can try on a variety of lives, emotions, responses, and actions. Pretend is a way to alleviate boredom and even frustration. Imaginary friends are created to relieve children from loneliness. Play is also a huge stress reliever. Think back to when you were a child – do you remember any pretend play experiences? Why might you have been pretending?
Pretend play also allows children to respond to situations that make them anxious or frightful. Rehearsing a playful situation can help them understand and navigate their own fears, and pretend play can reduce stress surrounding those fears. For music students, performances can be common sources of stress, whether they be exams, festivals, recitals, or competitions. Music teachers can incorporate pretend play in their lessons to allow their child students to rehearse stressful musical scenarios from within an imagined musical world. One specific way to do this is to enact, in a variety of ways, the pretend recital.
One form of pretend recital could include puppets or toy characters. Puppets and small toys allow for the exploration of realistic emotions and scenarios, and they provide distance from emotions for comfort and manageable sizes for controllability. Teachers don’t need to spend large amounts of money on small toys. There are plenty of cheaper and more imaginative options! For example, a teacher could encourage her student to make a puppet or a stuffed animal out of a sock and a little piano out of a small cardboard box and some paper, glue, and crayons.
Before an upcoming performance, the student could choose a puppet performer, set up the other puppets as audience members, set up a miniature instrument (either a small toy or a cardboard/paper craft look-a-like), and act out the full performance. This performance could include having the puppet walk up to the stage, bow, put music on the stand, adjust the bench, sit down, take a breath, play the piece (and here, the student can go to the real instrument and play), bow while the audience claps, walk back down to the chair, high-five another animal, and sit down. The student may want to add more fun and even silly steps into the pretend recital! He could act this out with the puppet completely, and he may even want to do this more than once. The repetition of this activity would allow him to continue to imagine positive outcomes for his future recital.
After acting out the recital with small puppets and toys, a teacher could ask her student if he is comfortable to pretend that he is now playing in the recital. The student’s audience may still be the puppets, but he is the one acting, instead of another puppet. In this version of a pretend recital, the student is putting himself in the position of his future self and practicing the feelings that he might experience in an upcoming performance. To start the process, a teacher might find a simple prop to be useful. For example, she might place a scarf on the floor to represent the path that the student walks down as he makes his way from his seat in the audience to the instrument on the stage. Depending on the age and stage of the student, puppet audience members can still line the aisles. The student can repeat all performance steps that he had the puppet act out. The teacher can pretend to be another student in the recital, and they can take turns playing their piece. The more the student senses an environment of pretend play, the better!
While the envisioning of an upcoming performance is nothing new to music teachers, we can take this envisioning one step further for our students by including other characters, toys, props, and ourselves into their imaginative process. Setting the space, finding audience members, and allowing our students to go through the complete motions and emotions of a performance can engage our students’ imagination and help them learn from within their natural learning context. Pretend recitals give our students even more performance experience, and they are also fun for all involved, including for us teachers!
Written by Bronwyn Schuman, Founder of Music Theory Playground™ (Originally written for ARMTA in 2022)