Learning Centers Blog Hop Series: Dramatic Play Center

We are continuing this week with the Pre-K Partner's Learning Centers Blog Hop Series! So far we have taken a look at the math, writing, art, blocks, and science centers. This week we will learn about setting up the dramatic play center!

Here are a few photos of years past in the pretend/dramatic play center. I've always set it up to go along with what we are learning, seasons, or themes. I've also had students plan and set up their own dramatic play center such as a clothing store. Click here to see a list of my classroom themes. Sometimes it would change based on the students' interests as well. In the past I have changed the center fully every month. I added little things to it during the month. For example, January was set up as a winter theme with scarves, mittens, hot chocolate cups. We studied The Three Bears story one week so I added in bear stuffed animals, three of everything, and a few bear storybooks. When the drama center is changed over we have sat as a class in/around the center and have practiced with the items. Students learn where things go and how to clean it up. Students are learning life skills and organizational skills! 

Fall theme...Click HERE to see more fall center ideas!

Farmer's market theme... could go along with fall or spring theme...Pots, buckets, and baskets for sorting by size and color...

Baking theme... for November...lots of breads, cookies, pies, baking utensils, and cookbooks

Winter holiday theme...we read and compared several gingerbread stories around the time after Thanksgiving until winter break so the center is set up with gingerbread cookies and baking supplies..and some costumes. Search garage sales..they always have lots of holiday items!

January through February leads into studying winter animals, winter seasonal stories, and fairy tales...This photo shows the center set up in a three bears theme.. Notice how the chocolate chip cookies are different sizes...I asked my mother in law to make them that way for a reason..students can put the sizes in graduated order!  I have always loved to get as much skills into the centers as I can! 

Here is a Dr. Seuss "house"...I put in a mix of silly foods like felt green eggs & ham, variety of colored vegetables and fruits, and cupcakes...also a teapot! There was a bucket of silly hats and a mirror later!

Click HERE to see more Seuss center ideas! 

In this set up students planned what type of store they wanted, created their own wishlist of items, brought in items from home, set it up themselves, and labeled the store! See more of this idea HERE...

Spring is probably my most favorite themes! During the spring we learned about Eric Carle stories, gardening, and vegetables! This center was set up as a spring garden market or spring farmer's market. 

See more spring ideas HERE! 

The library as tons of great informational texts to add to your pretend/dramatic play center!

Students are not only learning social skills (sharing, taking turns, communicating) through dramatic play! The dramatic play center can be enriched with a wide variety of tools, manipulatives, books, toys, add-ons to help students practice literacy skills, math skills, and more! 

During our baking unit students are practicing sequencing recipes, ordering, retelling, and measuring with cups/spoons. They are also practicing cooking and life skills! Incorporate familiar stories like The Little Red Hen as well as cookbooks/nonfiction. 

Incorporate picture/word vocabulary in all of your centers with paper, clipboards, and pencils! Students will draw out their ideas and students who are interested and ready to write, will! Many, many of my students loved to write the vocabulary in the centers! The more picture/word connections they see, the more they will become familiar with those words!

Here is a photo of our hardware store! The kids had so much fun exploring familiar and unfamiliar new tools! So much measuring, counting, and comparing went on in this center! Students also sorted the colored paint chips and created mosaics with the tiles. Home depot donated aprons, carpet, and tile samples for free! See more of our construction study HERE.

I also like to have students explore their creativity in some way in the center. For example, the tile designs in the hardware store. In the garden show students can buy/sell items and design their own flower arrangements! See more spring theme HERE!



The most important thing to recognize about the pretend/dramatic play center is that it is for play and pretend! I can put as many skills (to be practiced) into the center as I want but they ultimate goal is to provide a place for students to be creative, make their own decisions, role play, have conversations, and just play! If they want to take the forks and pretend they are hairbrushes in a beauty parlor (while in your beautifully arranged "bakery store")...let them. Let them play.

I do love themes and providing play inspiration for students. If you see the students interested more in another theme or topic than you suggest...then go with it! Two students take the pretend chairs and fly off into the unknown in a "spaceship." Take that as an opportunity into peeking into their interests.  Go grab a spaceship book or pull up a kids NASA video on the Smartboard. You might find them grabbing the clipboards to draw or write a space story, telling each other their plans, getting their verbal skills going! You might end up doing a two week or more project approach study on space shuttles. It's okay to switch it up..go with the flow.. Some of our best in the moment creative learning classroom experiences came from doing the unexpected and going with student led decisions! 

Students need a large area/space to play in the dramatic play center. They need plenty of room to explore, move, interact, and create!  The basics needed are of course a stove, sink, and a table w/ chairs. You can also include shelving, a bookcase, or a rug.  

At the very beginning of the year I have always had my pretend center very very basic. The items were familiar and similar to what students had at home. It's set up as a home since in August/September we learned about families and All About Me.

- old cell phones or pretend phone

- pots and pans

- butter, milk, eggs, bread, breakfast items

- pretend iron/ironing board

- empty food boxes and laundry soap/dish soap boxes

- sponge, gloves, dish scrubber

- plates, cups, and napkins

- regular large sized clothes for dress up & for ironing

- baby dolls and cribs/highchair

- vocabulary

- clipboards, paper, pencils

As the weeks/months go on you can change/add in more items that fit what you are learning about. 

Having different textures and sizes of pretend foods provide interest, variety, and are fun! My mother in law made tons of amigurumi crochet items for my classroom! I like to make items out of felt. See more HERE. I also used store bought plastic pretend food and empty food containers like cereal boxes. 

This was a setup from August. Students learned how to set the table. The dollar store has inexpensive non-breakable dishes!

Baskets and containers are great to have for storage and help students pick up items easily. In this picture you can see all the different foods. Students can put the pumpkins in size order!

Costumes and dress up clothes are always a fun addition to add to any theme in the pretend/dramatic play center. Students just love to play and pretend. This apron and hat was purchased at Walmart and then I used puff paint to write on it.

Always try to integrate literacy through posting vocabulary and providing related books in the center. It's such an easy addition to do and will enrich your learning center!

The teacher's role during the dramatic play is to act as a guide or facilitator. The teacher can ask questions about the character roles the students are playing or what their plans are. Center time is a great time to document and listen in on student learning and student conversations. The teacher's role is also to provide materials in the center to enrich creative thinking and curiosity in all learning areas. 

Hop on over to Fun in ECSE to learn more ideas for your dramatic play center!

Clothing Study (part 2)

Last week I mentioned our clothing unit study. (Read about it here!) We have started to use Creative Curriculum studies to help guide students and introduce them to new learning experiences. I like how Creative Curriculum provides many ideas for hands on activities in all learning areas! The curriculum is project based and provides excellent motivation and questioning techniques that lead students into higher thinking learning.  Through provocations, bringing in real items, questioning, and other activities, students were interested in setting up their own clothing store last week.   This activity was student led and the students themselves actually came up with the list of items needed.  I showed students a slideshow of familiar stores in our area and they were so excited to shout out the names (environmental print!!) and they also described what items came from the stores. We listed things we thought we needed for the clothing store and then watched a virtual tour/video of a real clothing store (since we cannot go on field trips) and added more to our list. I posted the list on our class Facebook page and parents were more than willing to help donate and let us borrow items for the week. It actually became a fun parent/child at home activity!   Different groups of students did different things to help set up the store. Some students folded or hung clothes, some wrote out their own price stickers (post-its!), and some created their own signs! 

Here's a photo of two of our students folding donated items and setting up shop!  THEY decided the clothes needed to be folded and I let them have at it! 

We recieved a wide variety of clothing items from party dresses and Batman shirts to furry hats and cowboy boots. 

They decided our signs needed pictures (similar to our vocab. cards). 

Neatly folded and labeled... it was all their idea!  They loved role playing in their pretend clothing store!  Here are some links below to some of the books we read to go along with this study.  I always try to have a variety of types of books with each topic we study that include: fairy tales, familiar stories, familiar characters, rhyming, math, easy retell, and informational books.

Fall Room Tour! (Part 2)

Our math center!  

We used real pumpkins in whole group math to practice ordinal numbers. Students took turns placing the pumpkins in order. Then, a student was selected to take a pumpkin away and hide it as the other students closed their eyes. They took turns guessing which number/pumpkin was missing! Now the pumpkins have moved into our math center! Students can have hands-on practice with ordinal numbers or they can act out the story below.

There are a couple versions of "Five Little Pumpkins." I wrote this version to incorporate the pumpkin life cycle/production sequence. 

These mini pumpkins and leaves were in the Target dollar aisle! I made the cards on photoshop.

This is an idea I found on pinterest. They are fall tactile number cards! Students had to carefully punch the dots/count 10 and punch out the dots on the numeral with a thumbtack. I know what you are thinking..20 four year olds with thumbtacks..SCARY!  ..but amazingly they were so careful and focused (and quiet!) while they were punching dots with the tacks! Then they glued seed pods (beans) to their cards.  This activity idea is from: http://thepreschooltoolboxblog.com/?p=1216

Here is a photo of our fall harvest pretend center..

I love having  books, vocabulary, and writing in most of the centers! Fellow teachers that I worked with last year showed me how to incorporate literacy into practically any center! 

Our discovery center! 

In this center we have: color sensory bottles, rainbow observing with cd's/flashlights, rainbow light up wands, rain stick,magnets, ABC/number wood chips, tree slice, fall leaves, and colored feather sorting. 

We also have white boards for writing vocabulary, life cycle sequencing cards (from: http://www.montessoriforeveryone.com/assets/PDF/Life_Cycle_of_a_Pumpkin.pdf), binoculars, seasonal books, and our ongoing experiments! 

The teacher across the hall introduced me to "Sid the Science Kid" videos!  She always does something fun in class to go along with the Sid experiment.  She had her class do an experiment with decaying bread, clean/dirty apples, and part of a pumpkin.  We tried the bread and the apples. For the bread, we had the students squirt the slices with water, place in ziploc baggie, and hang in the window. For the apple, we passed around a slice of apple and talked about germs on our hands. The clean untouched apple was placed straight into the mason jar. It took less than a week for us to notice the differences! And my oh my is it disgusting! I am amazed at this experiment! The kids love saying "decay." I had one little boy say at lunch, "I'm eating decayed cheeto today!"  Science is my favorite part of the day! : ) 

We've had a pumpkin seed taste test and also some pumpkin investigations/observations! Did I mention I love fall?!! 

 We had tested a pumpkin in  class to see if it would sink or float. Then we made boats out of tin foil, floated them, and then sank them with marbles. Students counted how many marbles sank their boat ..love it when science and math combine!  Each student took home a mini pumpkin over the weekend with instructions to report back on how they sank their pumpkin (without using their hands!) I love how their ideas were their own. Some students wrote word for word how they did their experiment, some drew a picture, some parents even took pictures! A few ideas were to scoop it out and let it soak overnight, tape a hammer to it, tape legos to it, and tape a toy plane to it... (see if it flies instead of sinks! HA!)


Check out another fall setup HERE!

Wings and things!

As I was going through past photos of this year on my camera card..I found the long lost photos of our insect jars!  This was such a fun activity and it incorporated nature/creativity!  I printed off the mason jar template from here: http://sweetlyscrappedart.blogspot.com/2011/07/mason-jar-i-love-mason-jars-free.html

Then, during our insects and garden unit,  our class went for a nature walk and collected all little sorts of nature artifacts in ziploc baggies.  I pre-labeled the baggies with their names and all my assistant had to do was pull out their nature bag when it was their turn for art. 

I love how precise this one is... This student is always very careful and takes time in whatever she does.. We visited our school pond and it looks like she made some lily pads in her jar! 

Students were encouraged to illustrate their own insects...

I love this student collected a little bit of dirt...she said it was in case her ladybug got hungry..HAHA! 

I picked this game up at a garage sale last summer..FOR A DOLLAR!  So much fun...the bees are in the hive..students take turns pulling out the leaf sticks..a few bees fall into the personal trays and students count their bees at the end! LOVE IT! 

SO FUN when I see skills being practiced in action!!  Candid photos are the best!! I save my old cell phones and put a few in the pretend center so students are encouraged to practice oral language skills.... I had this one Spanish only speaking student this year..He could talk up a storm on one of these old cell phones!

I've been trying to encourage writing in all of the centers...  interesting and unique writing utensils like crayola twist up colored pencils, gel pens, and these flower pens are fun ways to get students to WANT to write! 

"telephone"  leave a couple of these pvc pipes in a center.. and just see what wonderful things can happen!  

FLOWER POWER!! These grass styrofoam boxes were a display to hold mini pinwheels at hobby lobby..I asked the manager if  I could have them and he gave me four!  Students practiced flower arranging and fine motor skills in the sensory tub!