Grocery Store Dramatic Play

For the two weeks before Thanksgiving I did a grocery store dramatic play center.  Obviously Thanksgiving is so much about food - and there is a lot of shopping - I thought it would be a great extension of  their real life.  I think I could have kept this center all year long and they wouldn't have gotten bored of it.

Here is our store

At the entrance of our store I put some purses, cell phones, keys, money, and some credit cards.  

I found this gem at Good Will for 5 dollars!  This was the hit of the grocery store - and of my own children, Noah literally spent hours at it.

I had organized and labeled everything that I could.  Before we "opened" the store we took a tour of it and read all the word and talked about how the words help us know where things go during clean up.  We also talked about that after you are done shopping you have to put all your food back on the shelf so someone else can shop.  It is very satisfying for them to empty the entire shelf or basket into their cart - I didn't want to stop them from being able to do that - they just needed to understand that they would have to put it all back.  It took some reminding and some hep - but by day 3 they all had it down.  Some kids found they they really enjoyed organizing and putting other peoples groceries away.

I loved how several of the kids chatted on the phones while doing their shopping.  Such an obvious experience in their real world - not how I grew up for sure!

During the second week I introduced the concept of making lists in our writing.

I did it during our large group time in the morning.  It was the week before Thanksgiving so first we made a list on the board, and I modeled how to make a list of things we would eat at our Thanksgiving feast.  Then I handed them a Shopping list and together we made a list of things we would need to buy to make our feast.

 I then put shopping lists and pencils in our store for the kids to use.