Bakery Dramatic Play Center for Preschool or Kindergarten

Our kids love dramatic play activities and we try to introduce a new center every month or two.

This week our theme has been BAKERY and it has definitely been one of their favourites.   

The kids took turns assuming the different roles at the bakery - namely, the customer, the baker, the cashier, or the clerk.

We used this wipeable form and a dry erase marker for the customer's order.

Either the customer filled out his order on the form, or when we had two clerks, one would fill out the form and the other clerk would fill the order.

The order would be placed in one of the take out bags or on a paper plate if the customer was "eating in."   

We left some money in a basket by the till that the customer could use to pay the cashier.

It was always interesting to see how much the cashier would charge.
  One cashier announced the cost of two cookies was $900!!  A little steep, but the customer seemed happy to pay it!

Below you can see our bakers in the kitchen working hard to keep the store stocked.

We had a variety of equipment and ingredients, each with its own label.  
Here is a sample of some of the items.

After the bakers added all the ingredients to a bowl, they'd mix it up, then pop the cookies in the oven to bake.

A close up of the baked goods can be seen below.  
They look pretty yummy, no?  

All these baked items were laminated for durability and then I used a glue gun to back them with foam paper.
This made them thicker and easier for the kids' little fingers to pick up.

The awesome repeat customers were rewarded with a FREE cookie or FREE donut card for their next visit.

Some days we change up the bakery center and we let the bakers make the cookies and other treats out of playdough.  
We use our bakery playdough mats for this.

We have a mat for cookies, donuts, cupcakes, a plate mat, and then a cooling rack mat, as well.

The bonus of the mats is that set up and take down of the bakery is quick and easy. 
 And the mats are easy to store, too!

Would you like to set up your own bakery?
All the items you see in the photos, plus many more signs, labels, and 3 game ideas are included in my Bakery Dramatic Play Set in my Teach Easy Resources Store.  

Just $3.95 for the pack!
Cookie, anyone?

   

  

Like to Garden? Take a Peek at these Great Center Time Activities Idea for Spring!

I think a big part of what makes spring special (for ME, anyway!) is seeing all the flowers come to life.

  The world goes from gray, gray, gray to a canvas filled with pinks and purples and yellows...!

Everywhere you look - colour and new life.

  And of course there's finally some SUN to go along "with"!

This weekend I was out in my own garden getting my raspberry beds weeded.  

I DO NOT like weeding, but I do love raspberries so I do the work!  

I like to celebrate this time of year in my classroom by planting some real flowers with the kids, as well as bringing in some fun spring flower games and activities.

This year one of our popular activities has been playing

FLOWER SHOP.

The students get to make flower arrangements, wrap them in tissue paper OR place them in a plastic vase, add note cards, take phone calls, and "deliver" the flowers to the customers.  

They can also keep the shop organized by placing flowers into vases labelled with the correct flower names.

  The flower shop is a busy place!

  

For those customers who want a specific arrangement,  bouquets can be ordered using an erasable marker on one of four unique order forms.  

Shopkeeper:  "Would you like roses? 

Here's your order form.  Just circle the number and colour of roses you would like, and I'll have that order ready right away!"

Here is the collection of flowers, labels, and order forms I created to set up our classroom flower shop.

  (I also created a series of note cards to add to the bouquets.  You can see those in the third image in this post.) 

To set up the flower shop, I just added green popsicle sticks to the back of the flower images to create "stems," attached the flower labels to some plastic "vases" (icing containers work great!) and I was ready for business.

Once I posted my "OPEN" sign,  the customers started rolling in!

To encourage the children to practise counting and number recognition, I also created the 2-person game below to go with this flower theme.  

Players place the flower images on the garden mat and roll the die to see which flower they should pick up.  

 In preschool, we use this game to practise number recognition (both in terms of recognizing the number on the "dotted" die, as well as reading the numeral on the flower), but this game can also be made more challenging for  Kindergarten students.

  Older students can use two dies and then choose the flower that matches the sum of their roll. 

Players finish the game by counting the flowers to see who "picked" the most! 

Our class also loves to do mini-books.  

You can see the mini-book that I created for this unit at the top of the collage below. 

Other activities in this unit include a colour by number page, a 3D art project, and a fun circle time song and activity.  

This Flower Shop Unit is a total of 43 pages of fun and I'm currently offering it for $4.95 in my shop.

Keep your kids engaged with this seasonal unit and save yourself some valuable TIME as you deal with all the details of wrapping up the school year.    

If you'd like to scoop up this unit today

click {here}!

How Much is that Doggy in the Window? Set up a Pet Store in Your Classroom!

Our PET theme has been lots of fun for the kids this week.  

Part of the fun came from the PET STORE we set up in the dramatic play area.

This sign for the shop was a bit of a quick one (plus my felts were running out, as usual!), but it still helps set the stage for the shop.

My co-teacher and I both have pets so we raided our cupboards and closets to find extra leashes, bones, dog treats, and other paraphernalia to sell at the shop.

And here's our store - open for business!

As you will note on the shelves under the sign, we included a collection of animals to sell. 

 As long as my daughter doesn't check her toy box this week, I should be fine! :)

Here is a closer shot of some of the goodies we laid out.

Note:  You may just want to give the children a reminder not to eat the dog food.  

We had a couple of curious kids give the bones and treats a few licks!

Here you'll see our collection of "doggy bags."

When setting up the shop, we had joked about crumpling some brown paper and leaving it on the floor for the children to put in the bags (teaching good citizenship!), but in the end we decided that might not be appropriate. 

So...the bags were used for shopping!  

The balls were used for playing fetch and roll.

And the leashes and pet crate were used for walking their new pet friends around the classroom.  

Stay tuned for next week's dramatic play centre

 - Vet's office!

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Santa's Toy Shop in Preschool

Week 2 of our Countdown to Christmas is upon us!

And we even got a sprinkling of snow to help make our spirits bright!  

The snowfall wasn't enough to build a snowman, or really even much of a snowball, but you can't be picky when you live on the west coast!  Any bit of white gets celebrated at this time of year.

We already decorated our Chistmas tree as a class last week, but the children had so much fun with the process that we decided to bring in another smaller tree for decorating at center time.  

We placed the tree on a table along with an assortment of decorations.  We encouraged the kids to "undecorate the tree" when they had finished loading it up so that the next person could decorate it.  

To help encourage the undecorating process (which of course is never as fun as the decorating process), I placed a couple of toy cameras on the table so that the children could take a photo of their creation before they undid their handiwork.  

An annual tradition in our classroom at this time of year is to create a Santa's Workshop. Here we can see the elves busy at work creating toys for Santa!

We included a variety of props including elf hats; gift boxes with lids; toys to be "built;" building tools including toy hammers, drills, levels, screwdrivers, etc.; paintbrushes to pretend to paint the finished products, and more.  

After our gang of elves "built" some toys they would put them in the gift boxes and bags and either present them to children in the classroom, or place them temporarily under our class Christmas tree. 

This is the sort of play we usually see at the center, but the center is always open for new ideas.  

At one point the elves imagined a snow monster was coming to lay siege on the toyshop and steal all the presents.  Everything needed to be hidden, and fast!  

Not exactly what we had in mind, but definitely showing the preschoolers' imagination at work!   

At the station in the photo below we have the Gingerbread Man Count and Clip activity. 

The children count the buttons on the Gingerbread man's tummy and then clip the clothespin onto the corresponding number on the card. 

A great activity for counting practice, number recognition, and the development of fine motor skills.  

Today we put a few more touches on one of our Christmas Bulletin Boards.  Simple but festive.   

In case you're wondering, the trunk is made from brown tissue paper just crumpled lengthwise and stapled to the board.  So easy!  

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Pumpkin Store

Dramatic centers based on the idea of a store are always popular.  

Who doesn't love to shop!?

And what better store to have at this time of year than a Pumpkin shop?

There's lots to do at this little stand!   

There's the buying and selling of pumpkins and plastic apples...

And of course, the weighing and comparing of the different products...  

A good shopper must be sure he is getting his money's worth!

And for the particularly tidy shopkeepers, there's the merchandising of the products.  

For example, ordering the pumpkins from largest to smallest, 

or creating an arrangement of the pumpkins on little stands.  

(For the stands, I provided pieces of the trunk of a birch bark tree.)