Dramatic play ideas for preschool

This classic dramatic play center is another favorite. Set up a hospital with a triage cot, doctor costumes and lots of props. No explanation is needed! This is one of the centers (like the grocery store and the restaurant) that the children are usually very familiar with. They love to be called “Doctor”! Click HERE for more pictures of the set-up.

Hot Drink Cafe – Dramatic Play Center

Warm up with a mug of hot chocolate and a fresh pastry at the “Star Drinks” hot drink cafe. Click HERE to see lots of photo inspiration.

Ice Cream Parlor – Dramatic Play Center

Chocolate and mint ice cream with cherries on top… coming right up! Preschoolers love to scoop and sell this summer treat to their friends. Click HERE to see more pictures.

Do your students love to reread the books that you share with them in class? Set your dramatic play area up as a Library. Allow them to “check out” books with their very own library card and return them to school the next day.

Pancake and Waffle

What’s for breakfast?! Add the pancake and waffle sets (available HERE and HERE from Melissa & Doug) to the kitchen and fire up the grill. Children will love the custom menus and all of the toppings for their delicious breakfast.

Make a brick oven from a cardboard box and a roll of “brick” wrapping paper. Preschoolers will make pizzas, and order pizzas, and deliver pizzas, and pretend to eat pizzas ALL.DAY.LONG! Click HERE to see all the photos.

Post Office – Dramatic Play Center

Invite children to write letters to the parents or grandparents, to make cards for their classmates, and to deliver the mail at the Post Office Dramatic Play Center. Click HERE to see lots of pictures.

Can we take your order? The restaurant dramatic play center is chock full of opportunities to practice reading, writing, and teamwork. Click HERE to see the menu and order forms that are perfect for emergent readers.

Sandwich Shop – Dramatic Play Center

Switch the general restaurant into a fast-food sandwich shop. With this dramatic play idea, students will follow the menu board from left to right to choose the bread, protein, vegetables, and toppings for their very own sandwich.

Would you like a taco or a burrito from this very popular Taco Stand? Preschoolers will take your order then create the taco or burrito of your choice. What a way to “spice” up the dramatic play center!

Vet Clinic – Dramatic Play Center

While you’re learning about zoo animals, pets, or even the farm, this dramatic play Vet Clinic is a great way to engage children in pretend play. They will care for the animals and become veterinarians, x-ray technicians, and nurses.

Transformed trifold science boards into a straw house, a stick house and a brick house for an adorable version of the Three Little Pigs. Preschoolers who can memorize and act out stories will have great comprehension skills when they get to school. It’s also fun act out Goldilocks and the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Whether you’re setting up a plain restaurant, a pizza parlor, an ice cream shop, or a taco stand, here’s a surefire FUN way to spice it up. Add a drink machine! You can use a box or a bookshelf with just a few simple additions (paper cups and tissue paper) to make it extraordinary. Click HERE for more details.

If you’re looking for a quick set-up, cheap center, this is it! Get all the supplies from the dollar store and added water. It’s great for summer, too. Take those kids outside and put them to work! Sometimes the best dramatic play ideas are the simplest.

Put on paleontology hats and look for dinosaur bones and footprints at this dramatic play dig site. Click HERE to see how to use a simple ingredient from the craft store to turn the sensory table into an excavation site.

Do your kids like to pretend or role play? What is your favorite way to set it up? Whatever it is, have tons of fun playing and learning with your children today.

Be sure to follow this Dramatic Play Pinterest board for even more dramatic play ideas.

Follow Play to Learn Preschool’s board Dramatic Play Preschool on Pinterest.

All dramatic play idea printables are available HERE:

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Ideas for children - Theater City magazine : Theater City magazine

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Ideas for children

Interviewed by Alexander Platunov according to the account, the festival "Harlequin". On the eve of the festival, we met with its Managing Director Marina Kornakova.

- Marina! Your festival and the Harlequin National Prize are already well known both in St. Petersburg and in Russia. And yet - for those who, perhaps, first became interested in "Harlequin", a few words about its history and goals.

— The Looking Glass Theater is a place where not only original performances are born, but also modern projects. In the early 2000s, it seemed that in our country a theater for children was on the verge of creative death. Most of the children's performances in the Russian open spaces were made as if under a blueprint by directors - "triples". The theater for children as a whole looked like a kind of cesspool, where everything that was unsuitable in the theater for adults was dumped. The older generation of directors who worked successfully for children in the 70s and 80s were leaving, the middle generation looked at the children's theater indifferently, and the young directors were categorically not interested in them.

The idea of ​​Alexander Vasilyevich Petrov, artistic director of Through the Looking Glass, was to understand and change the existing context of the theater for children in Russia. Through the Looking Glass has been successfully working with several generations of viewers, so it was not about the fate of this theater and not about the situation in St. Petersburg, the goal was much broader: the Russian children's theater needed an ambulance. "Harlequin" appeared in 2004 as this same ambulance, so from the very beginning it was conceived as an all-Russian one. In addition, a system of creative incentives was initially envisaged for those who proved with their performance the ability to work in this direction with high quality: the National Prize in the field of theatrical art for children was established as part of the festival, and the theater that won the prize for the best performance receives funds for staging more one children's play. And now there are already many performances all over the country, in which the same premium money has been invested - from the theaters of Yakutia, Siberia, the Urals to the Moscow RAMT and the St. Petersburg MDT. By the way, one of these performances is on the poster of the current "Harlequin": "Alisa" of the Krasnoyarsk Youth Theater.

It was very important for us to awaken in young directors the desire to engage in theater for children, to infect a new generation of directors with children's theater. Therefore, from the very first festival, acting and directing laboratories for students and recent graduates of theater universities were held within the framework of Harlequin. They were especially successful in collaboration with the Russian Academic Youth Theater in 2010 and 2012: out of the twelve excerpts shown then, eight full-fledged performances were soon born in various theaters of Russia, including the famous play "Lyolya and Minka" by Ruzanna Movsesyan at RAMT. It seems to us that our efforts to support young directors are not in vain!

- That is, over the past 12 years since the first festival, there have been noticeable changes in the Russian children's theater?

- Absolutely. But the point, of course, is not only in Harlequin. The crisis of the children's theater was obvious, and many began to resist it. A number of creative projects of the Union of Theater Workers of Russia have appeared, which provide grants for conducting laboratories, staging performances by young directors, and writing plays by young playwrights.

The results of the past 10-12 years are fixed by the poster of "Harlequin": in recent years, these are all the works of young directors. They put on children's performances not because there was no place for them in the adult theater - it is precisely the desire to work for children. There are young directors who devote themselves almost entirely to children's theater. For example, Polina Struzhkova. On April 25, the festival will show the performance of the Omsk Youth Theater “The foxes have long noses”, staged by Polina based on the play by the contemporary German playwright Ulrich Hub. His play "At the Ark at Eight" is shown in many places in Russia, and "The Foxes Have Long Noses" was opened for the national theater by Polina: she was the first to stage it in Omsk.

Our directorial labs are held in a new format every year. Two years ago, the theme of the laboratory sounded like "Unstaged fairy tales." About 70 applications-explications came from many cities of Russia with fairy tales that had never been staged. And the theater managers who came to us, of course, snapped up both these names and the guys who invented performances based on these tales. Loosening the soil for young directors so that they give new shoots is the constant concern of Harlequin. And young directors strive to come to us, realizing this.

— Perhaps the most important thing, including for young directors, is the opportunity for unity that the festival gives?

— Of course. "Harlequin" has become a meeting place not only for representatives of young directors, but also for many practitioners of the theater for children from all over the country. The festival for them is a rich professional school. We always have a lot of guests, we invite directors, directors, theater directors from all regions - from Sakhalin and Khabarovsk to Arkhangelsk and the Caucasus to Harlequin. Here they receive a professional charge, without which changes in this story of a stalled theater for children are impossible.

Selection for the Harlequin competition program is conducted by an expert council consisting of leading critics. They watch about a hundred performances on video (we ask theaters to provide very high-quality filming) and, if possible, live. These are people who travel around Russia with might and main, being Golden Mask experts, jury members of other festivals, and see many performances with their own eyes.

In addition to the competition, we have non-competitive and special programs - we form them ourselves. These programs are closely soldered into thematic blocks. For example, at all recent festivals, the theme of "theater of equal opportunities" is very important for us - the problem of accessibility of the theatrical environment for a "special" child and his involvement in theatrical creativity itself. Every year at Harlequin, we hold a round table on this topic and always show relevant performances.

We have, for example, our beloved Piano Theater from Nizhny Novgorod - children from a boarding school for deaf and dumb children, led by a real ascetic Vladimir Chikishev, who at the last festival received the main Harlequin Award - "For great service to theater for children" . He has been working with this boarding school for 30 years. Thanks to the Piano Theater, unfortunate children from a special institution on the outskirts of the city turn into real stars with a completely different self-esteem! The Piano children have repeatedly come with performances to the Harlequin, performed at the Golden Mask, accompanying the ceremony of presenting the most honorable award - For Honor and Dignity, they often tour abroad.

We brought from Moscow a performance for blind children - the unforgettable "May Night", a brilliant work by the young director Karolina Zhernyte, which received all kinds of prizes from us. At the "May Night" in the hall there were both blind children from the Grotto school, and sighted children in black blindfolds, who also perceived the performance with all their senses, except for sight, and became spiritually closer, more sympathetic to their blind peers.

This year, within the framework of the festival, the premiere of the performance of the St. Petersburg director Yana Tumina "Kolino's composition" based on poems and texts by Kolya Golyshev, a boy with Down syndrome, will take place. The performance brought together leading St. Petersburg actors who will help the audience understand: a “special” child is a special, uniquely filled world that frightens many just because we don’t know anything about him.

The current “Harlequin” will present the audience with Andersen’s “Snow Queen” from Cologne, a performance where deaf-and-dumb teenagers from Germany take part, and in the hall there will be children with the same ailment along with ordinary viewers: an inclusive project will give the entire audience the opportunity to easily perceive the meaning of their beloved fairy tales.

— What else would you like to note in the current festival program?

- I would note everything - from the first to the last performance, and almost all of them are staged by young directors! Harlequin is a festival of the best Russian performances for children, for the whole family, and parents know how difficult it is to find a real theatrical event for a child.

I think that the very opening of the festival will become such a holiday: the thirteenth Harlequin will start on April 22 with Benjamin Britten’s children’s opera Noah’s Ark, the premiere performance of Through the Looking-Glass, in which the soloists and choir of the children’s music and theater studio of our theater, as well as children's flute and string ensembles.

Petersburg children and parents should definitely see the performance of the Krasnoyarsk Youth Theater "Alisa". This theatrical fantasy based on the fairy tales of Lewis Carroll is a breathtakingly spectacular visual theater, where a mysterious fairy-tale space surrounds the audience right away, even in the foyer of the theater. And then - "everything is more wonderful and wonderful"! Muscovites will also see Alisa in April: she has been nominated for both Harlequin and the Golden Mask.

"From St. Petersburg to Mirgorod", Theater "Through the Looking Glass"

The performance of the St. Petersburg Small Drama Theater "The Wizard of Oz" has already captivated those spectators who saw it. I note: getting to KIM Avenue, where the NDT is located, is not as quick and easy as to the Looking Glass Theater, on the stage of which this famous Baum fairy tale will come to life.

The Lensoviet Theater staged a musical based on the fairy tale by Selma Lagerlöf "The Wanderings of Nils" with music by Maxim Leonidov and Alexander Shavrin: a deep, fascinating, scary, funny and very beautiful story of the growing up of the soul.

Two performances - "The Little Mermaid" by the Yekaterinburg Youth Theater and "Journey to the Jumbly Country" by the Perm Opera and Ballet Theater - will be shown on the big screen and presented by their directors (alas, for various reasons, these wonderful works will not be able to come to the festival).

Tenth-graders of the remarkable Moscow "Class Center", which unites general education, music and theater schools, will play the teenage drama "Loves - does not love" staged by Sergei Kazarnovsky, the legendary teacher, director, director and creator of the "Class Center".

The work of the Arkhangelsk Puppet Theater “What is it like to be a child?” was created in an unusual format. is a performance for parents that helps them look at the world through the eyes of a child. It will take place in the building of the Library of History and Culture of St. Petersburg at 72, Marata Street, a unique monument of the Art Nouveau era with an amazing fireplace made by Vrubel (the performance will be preceded by a tour of this house).

"Harlequin"-2016 gathered more than ever a lot of St. Petersburg performances for children. Among them is the joyful, young, energetic, recklessly staged and played "The Kid and Carlson" by Grigory Kozlov's Masterskaya Theatre. There are also two real theatrical experiments. These are Vitaliy Dyachenko’s play “The Iliad of the Odyssey”, where children sit inside a fantastic Trojan horse, and “Battered Pussies”, a performance-journey on the New Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater, where there are no usual spectator seats: the audience is invited to sit on rolling tables, and around them the mysterious comes to life. a fabulous space... In the video-opera performance "Don't Lie" based on children's stories by Mikhail Zoshchenko (Melting Point Theater Group), professional opera vocalists enter into a playful partnership with their cartoon counterparts.

The hosts of the festival, the Looking Glass Theater, in addition to the premiere of Noah's Ark, will present another premiere: a pastoral to the music of Bach "The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep" with the participation of the second-year students of the Theater Institute - the course of Alexander Petrov. And one more performance of "Through the Looking Glass" - "From Petersburg to Mirgorod". It combines two one-act operas based on Gogol: the phantasmagorical "The Overcoat" by Ilya Kuznetsov and the comic "Opera about how Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich quarreled" by Gennady Banshchikov.

Of course, and this time "Harlequin" will bring together very young directors, students of our Theater Institute - in the director's laboratory, where performances staged by them based on modern German dramaturgy will be shown.

The program of the festival matches the character of the Harlequin himself - a character who leaves no room for boredom, peace and everyday life!

Go to repertoire

Creative learning and development of toddlers: ideas and activities

Submitted by maftunakh on Sun, 05/01/2022 - 12:02

Encourage your toddler's creative play

For toddlers, creative play is all about creation, imagination and self-expression. There is no right or wrong in how toddlers create and react to art.

By pulling away from your child's play, you can encourage him/her to explore the world in his/her own way. This is important for learning and development.

You can also encourage your baby's creative play by giving him/her plenty of free time to do so. Sometimes your baby may need five minutes. On other days it can take all morning, from one activity to the next. When your child has enough time, he/she can come up with a lot of creative ideas.

Be sure to praise the child for everything he/she creates. This helps him/her feel positive and encourages him/her to keep creating.

Creative Activities: Fine Arts and Crafts

Your child can use everyday items and recycled arts and crafts. Here are some ideas to help your child get started:

• Make a puppet or animal out of empty kitchen paper rolls or small plastic bottles. Your child can color them with felt-tip pens, decorate with stickers, scrap paper cutouts, fabric and other elements.
• Use natural material. For example, go on a nature walk to collect fallen leaves. Your child can use them to draw, stick on paper, or dip into paint.
• Find a very large cardboard box and let your child decorate it with crayons, paints and other materials. It could be a house, a boat, a cave, and so on. You could help your child cut windows or doors.
• Make binoculars by taping two empty toilet paper rolls together. Attach the tape as a strap on both sides. Your child can then explore the garden with their new binoculars.
• Thread small plastic caps, large wooden beads or pasta tubes onto the string to make a decoration. This can be a good activity for older children.

Keep a box of recycled items for DIY toys and imaginative play, such as crayons, stickers, empty food containers, paper plates, bottle caps, scraps of wrapping paper, egg cartons, and ribbons. Just make sure all items are safe; It is very important that items for your baby do not pose a choking hazard ( due to inhalation of a foreign body, blockage of air flow outside the body, or constriction of the throat ). Small beads and plastic bags are dangerous for small children. Keep them out of reach.

Creative Activity: Movement and Dance

These creative play ideas can help your child express himself through movement and dance:

• Play music that will get your child moving. You can try different styles of music or music from other cultures.
• Join your little one for a "warm-up". For example, you can crawl, roll, jump, jump or spin together. Gradually step back and let the child lead the dance.
• Give your child some props to dance with. It can be ribbons on sticks, a spoon and beat box, a toy guitar, a rattle or a homemade puppet, whatever your child likes.

Drama ideas

Toddlers love drama0012 ) games. You can use simple props like old clothes, bags, dolls, toys, baskets and balls to help your child get started. Your child can:

• pet the "baby" to help him fall asleep;
• change the "diaper" on the toy;
• dress up as mom, dad, teacher, doctor or truck driver;
• collect a few bags to go shopping, hiking or to work;
• drive an imaginary train;
• wash your car or your favorite toy.

Music and sound

You can make music part of other programs. You can also combine music, drama and dance.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Sing simple nursery rhymes or songs while changing diapers, babysitting in the bath, traveling in the car, etc.

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