How Play and Storytelling Can Support Relationships and Communication

Play is the language of all children. Often in my experience children who could not speak about events in their lives due to stress or communication barriers found a way to show their understanding and emotion through both repetitive and spontaneous play. By participating in this play, parents can offer them a chance to broaden their ability to express themselves and to understand new situations and share ideas and memories. In this webinar we will consider play as a foundation of relating, language, and understanding our environment, and how it can be integrated into family activities through research and examples of different styles of play including sensory play, playing with others, storytelling, dealing with crisis, and using play as research and enjoying family memories in different mediums and forms of communication. Children and parents will be invited to participate in some introductory storytelling activities or to consider how they are already engaging in storytelling and how they might build on their current interests