Dollplay That Informs Literacy and The Arts

        The following Strategies written by Kathy Grimm are posted here to help educators develop their own goals and scenarios for formal dollplay activities in the classroom. Levels are achieved at different rates because of environment, information and experiences. Sometimes levels are affected by age, interest, and adaptability. 

Strategy in Dollplay: Level 1

1. Reading Labels on Toys
2. Collecting objects into categories 
3. Interpreting a social response related to a scenario or event
4. Making up a story about a picture 
5. Looking at a series of photos and discerning how something is made
6. Recall a story that you have heard many times and order the events 
7. Reciting short rhymes
8. Identify patterns and colors and shapes
9. Mimic Rythm
10. Playing and manipulating the hands
11. Listening to directions and following

Strategy in Dollplay: Level 2

1. Recall the history behind objects
2. Recall the history behind people
   
3. Reasoning behind what design elements belong under a theme
4. Writing a story about a single picture/photograph
   
5. Reading a series of instructions to make something
6. Combining elements that go together to make a historical costume
7. Putting patterns together
8. Combining body elements to create a unusual, abstract character
9. Playing and manipulating with tools
10. Repeating patterns, mixing colors, making conventional shapes
11. Reading directions and following

Strategy in Dollplay: Level 3

1. Dramatic Scenarios - telling a story by writing script
   
2. Photographic Scenarios - telling a story using pictures you take
   
3. Combining pieces of clothing to create a new assemble 
4. Making your own version of a craft without directions
5. Selecting a person in history and making a historically accurate object they might use.
6. Discerning 'archetypes' in a play or story and making an argument that supports your opinion
7. Designing patterns of your own.
8. Random selection of persons, places and things to create a doll not predetermined
   
9. Making the tools that you manipulate
10. Inventing complex patterns, mixing tertiary colors, designing abstract shapes
11. Making directions for others to follow