My little friend (three years old) got a hand puppet – a soft, white kitten. I put it on my hand and showed him. “Oh… It’s alive!”, he said. He was talking to the cat and cuddeling it kindly. Did he think it was a real kitten?
When the kitten stopped moving, pretending it was asleep, he said: “You have to move your fingers!” – He obviously knew the kitten was not moving by itself. But he absolutely did not want to put his own hand inside it and handle it himself… as if this would spoil his ability to imagine that the kitten was real. As long as someone else was handling it, the textile puppet and the real kitten could co-exist in the same time. In children’s play, there are no contradictions between reality and fantasy (Vygotsky, 2004), but rather synergy: The hand inside was activating the puppet’s movements, and the boy's experience of the movements was supporting his imagination.
Vygotsky, L. S. (2004). Imagination and Creativity in Childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42(1), 7-97. Retrieved from http://mesharpe.metapress.com/link.asp?id=265tnearjknc0220
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