This became one of my most favourite areas in the classroom to create. It was always based on student interest and we always had so much engagement and excitement in this area!
This is how our dramatic play area started – as a house center. We just wanted to see how the kids played and what they enjoyed before making it into something else. This center became a house area again later in the year, but it was more elaborate this time since we knew how much the kids loved to play there.
Our first transformation was into a grocery store. All of the items you see here on the shelves are thanks to donations from families – even the name “Class Supermarket” came from our students!
Another much-loved area complete with surgeon’s clothing, a laptop, patient checklists, stuffed animals, books, and even an x-ray table with films!
At Christmas time this center became a gingerbread bakery where they could mix up, bake and decorate pretend gingerbread cookies.
Our students had so much fun writing letters and cards to each other in this center! Each child had a mailbox on the wall, and every day we would choose a handful of people that would receive mail – when you went to the center, you needed to choose one of those people to write to. We had postcard templates, letter templates, stamps, parcels, a cash register and of course – a mailbox!
One of my personal favourite iterations – a farm! This farm was fully operational with a tractor, a garden, vegetable and fruit seeds, a chicken coop, a barn, and even some lemonade to help them cool off after a long day on the farm!
A spring time dramatic play area in the form of a garden center! Students could come over and pick out seeds to purchase, they could make their own floral arrangements and buy other gardening supplies such as shovels, gardening gloves and bags of soil. They could also design a floral arrangement on paper to take home and – the pinnacle of excitement – they could paint a flower mural on the paper hanging on the wall!
Because we were not allowed to have a carpet for much of the year, our big wooden blocks barely saw any use because they would be too loud to play with on the straight linoleum floor. Enter, our construction zone dramatic play area! We put a small carpet down and moved our blocks over. We also added other building materials such as pool noodles, paper towel rolls and plates. There were tools, construction hats, pylons and construction words!
Dramatic Play was difficult in my second classroom, mostly because it was a small space requiring tables for 29 students – there simply wasn’t much room, and we didn’t have an supplies or furniture available when I started. However, thanks to the donations from another teacher, we were able to set up a house center in a small corner of the classroom – the kids loved it!
