Dramatic play themes for preschoolers
Ultimate List of Dramatic Play Ideas for Preschoolers
Do you need dramatic play ideas to spice up your pretend play area? If your play pretend play area needs a refresh, you’re in the right place!
Dramatic Play Ideas for Preschoolers
Pretend play is one of the most effective ways to help young children learn important academic skills in preschool. Setting up your dramatic play center as a basic home-living or housekeeping center is a great way to get started. But if you really want to engage and motivate your little learners, then you’ll want to try out some of these creative dramatic play ideas to give your center a makeover.
Why is Dramatic Play Important
There are so many social, emotional, and academic benefits young children learn when they’re engaged in dramatic play. Here are just some of those benefits:
Attention Spans — Have you ever noticed that your kids can’t seem to sit and listen to a story for very long, but they could play forever in the dramatic play center? It turns out, when they’re given uninterrupted chunks of time to play, your kids are developing increased attention spans.
Oral Language — Young children talk to each other in the dramatic play center, talking to their peers freely helps them develop critical vocabulary skills. When they talk to each other they’re practicing both receptive and expressive language skills, which both have a direct relationship to future reading success.
Self-Regulation — Concepts like sharing and taking turns are important life skills that can be learned while engaging in daily dramatic play experiences
Dramatic Play Themes for Preschool
Apple Orchard Dramatic Play Center
Picking apples has never been so much fun! Your kids will have a blast picking apples and so much more in this adorable apple orchard dramatic play center.
Baby Nursery
Do your kids have younger sisters or brothers at home? Are they fascinated with babies? A baby doll nursery is perfect for any time of the year because it’s meaningful to all young children.
They have a natural fascination with babies, which makes this baby nursery dramatic play center even more fun and engaging!
Bakery Dramatic Play Ideas
Setting up a bakery is during any time of the year, but can be especially fun around the holidays. During the holidays, baking may be taking place in homes and children may be tasting lots of yummy holiday treats – making this bakery dramatic play theme even more meaningful.
Birthday Party Dramatic Play Theme
It’s no secret that young children are obsessed with their birthdays! Your kids will have a blast pretending it’s their birthday with this super fun birthday dramatic play center.
Camping Dramatic Play Ideas
Camping is a unique and fascinating dramatic play theme for young children. What could be better than sleeping outdoors or cooking hot dogs and marshmallows over a fire? Your kids are sure to love this camping dramatic play theme.
Car Repair Shop
Your little mechanics will love fixing and repairing cars in the car repair shop dramatic play center.
Best Dramatic Play Themes
Dinosaur Dig Dramatic Play Center
Do you have any little dinosaur lovers in your classroom? Your kids will love learning about paleontologists and dinosaurs with this educational and fun dinosaur dramatic play center.
Doctor’s Office Dramatic Play Ideas
Most young children can relate to being sick and going to the doctor’s office. Use this familiarity to create a fun and educational doctor’s office dramatic play center your kids will love.
Fire Station
Putting out fires and responding to emergency calls will be the highlight of your student’s year in this fire station dramatic play center.
Flower Shop Dramatic Play Theme
Flowers are given for many different occasions such as; birthdays, anniversaries, graduation, weddings, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day and more.
Your little florists will love arranging, wrapping, and delivering flowers for special occasions with this flower shop dramatic play center.
Garden and Farmer’s Market
Turn your dramatic play center into a garden or a farmer’s market in the spring. This farmer’s market dramatic play center is the perfect addition to your spring or farm theme!
Dramatic Play Prop Boxes
Grocery Store Dramatic Play Center
All young children can relate to going to the grocery store. This familiar experience can be used to create an educational and super fun grocery store dramatic play center.
Dramatic Play Theme Ideas
North Pole Wrapping Station
Need a dramatic play center for a holiday theme? Your kids will love writing Christmas cards, and selecting and wrapping gifts in this fun North Pole dramatic play center.
Hot Chocolate Dramatic Play Center
Need a dramatic play idea for your winter theme? This hot chocolate dramatic play center will have your little baristas making and serving hot chocolate, and learning important academic skills while doing so!
Hair Salon
Hear me out, I promise I’m not crazy! Your little barbers and stylists will learn many important academic skills while working in this hair salon dramatic play center.
They’ll love styling the hair on doll heads instead of cutting their own.
Ice Cream Shop
Need a fun dramatic play theme for the end of the school year or summer? Look no further, this ice cream shop dramatic play center is packed full of educational opportunities disguised under mounts of pretend sprinkles and whipped cream.
Pizza Parlor
What toppings would you like on your pizza? Your kids will have so much fun taking orders, making, and delivering pizza with this pizza shop dramatic play theme.
Post Office
It’s true, most adults don’t look forward to going to the post office, but it can be a fun experience for little kids. Your little mail carriers will have a blast addressing packages, mailing postcards, and delivering mail with this post office dramatic play center.
Dramatic Play Prop Boxes
Pumpkin Patch
The pumpkin patch is always fun for young children.
There are hay rides, special treats, and pumpkins to pick! What’s not to like about this super fun pumpkin patch dramatic play center?
Restaurant
Breakfast and lunch are served! Your students will adore taking orders and serving customers in this restaurant dramatic play center.
Sandwich Shop
Your little learners will love ordering and making sandwiches in this sandwich shop dramatic play center!
Space Center
A space station dramatic play center offers many opportunities for your students to experience math, literacy, science, and STEM in fun and meaningful ways. Your little astronauts will love playing and learning in their very own space station!
Taco Stand
Make every day Taco Tuesday in your classroom with this super fun taco stand dramatic play center!
Vet Clinic
Your kids will love taking care of their pretend pets and making them feel better in their very own vet clinic dramatic play center.
More Dramatic Play Ideas
25 Dramatic Play Themes for Preschoolers
Do you need some fresh, new ideas for dramatic play themes in your preschool or Pre-K classroom? Young children learn best through play. When children engage in pretend, or dramatic play, they’re developing many important skills that will help them build a strong foundation for future success in school.
Peer-to-peer conversations build expressive and receptive oral language and communication skills. Children learn how to share and cooperate with the materials in a meaningful way.
When dressing and undressing baby dolls fine motor skills are being developed.
If planned carefully, literacy, math, and writing skills can also be incorporated into the dramatic play center. Here are some of my favorite themes for the dramatic play center.
Dramatic Play Themes
Animal Shelter – This mini-kit helps kids develop altruism and empathy while helping shelter animals, a great classroom project!
Apple Orchard – Fall in the air with this fun, pretend trip to the apple orchard! Watch creativity and imagination soar as your kids make pretend apple pies and follow the directional signs as they navigate their way through the pretend orchard.
Bakery – Little bakers will love ordering from the menu and serving up yummy treats in their very own bakery shop!
Camping Theme – It’s hard for little campers to contain their enthusiasm for this fun theme! Watch as they sit around the pretend campfire, make s’mores and use their lanterns! Perfect for building background knowledge.
Asian Restaurant – White or brown rice? A perfect addition to a study of Chinese New Year! A unique cultural experience your kids will never forget! Make lo-mein with yarn and practice “eating” with chopsticks!
Doctor’s Office – Have a cough or a fever? No problem, your kids will have you on the mend in no time with this meaningful dramatic play theme. All kids can relate to going to the doctor’s office, this one is always a huge hit with little ones!
Flower Shop – Need birthday flowers? Get well flowers? Wedding flowers? Everything you need for setting up a fun and creative flower shop in your classroom! Get your vases ready because you will be receiving LOTS of flowers from your little delivery people!
25 Dramatic Play Ideas
Garden – Perfect for the spring when you’re learning about plants and seeds! Build your own play garden with a box and some pool noodles, then watch as learning and fun abound!
Grocery Store – Did you remember your cloth bags? What could be more meaningful to a young child than a trip to the grocery store? So many opportunities for developing literacy, math, and writing skills with this popular dramatic play theme!
Holiday Wrapping Center – Get into the spirit of the holidays by wrapping gifts for family and friends! Your kids will love exploring sizes, writing for a purpose, and developing fine motor skills while playing and having fun.
Hot Cocoa Stand – Marshmallows or whipped cream? It’s tough to choose at this creative hot cocoa stand that your kids will adore during a fun winter theme!
Ice Cream Shop – One scoop or two? Choose your favorite summer treat at your local ice cream walk-up window. The perfect way to end your school year!
Taco Stand – Hard or soft shell? Pretend chips, salsa, and tacos- yum! A perfectly (pretend) delicious way to celebrate Latin culture in your classroom!
Fun Dramatic Play Themes
Pizza Center – Small, medium, or large? Choose your favorite toppings at your local pizza shop! Menus, signs, name tags and more provide plenty of opportunities for developing oral language, math, and literacy skills at the pizza parlor.
Post Office – First class? Perfect for a community helper theme! Printable stamps, post cards, and labels make this center a literacy and writing powerhouse!
Pumpkin Patch – The ultimate fall experience for kids! Collecting tickets for a pretend hay ride and selling pumpkin goodies at the walk-up pumpkin stand is a great way to build background knowledge about a popular topic.
Space Theme – Blast off with this fun space theme dramatic play kit! Prepare for a successful launch with the Captain’s Log, checklists, and charts that also build literacy and writing skills.
Vet’s Office – Fido not feeling well? Your little vets will have sick pets feeling better soon! Writing prescriptions and filling out patient charts provides plenty of meaningful literacy and writing experiences.
Pretend Play Ideas
19. This Dramatic Play Restaurant serves up kid favorites!
20. Your kids will love taking care of babies in the Dramatic Play Baby Nursery
21. A Dramatic Play Hair Salon will be a familiar play theme for your kids!
22. Who wants a sandwich? This Dramatic Play Sandwich Shop is sure to be a big hit with your little learners!
23. Laundry isn’t just for Mom! Everybody can help do the laundry with this fun laundry or Laundromat Dramatic Play Center!
24.
Got a flat? Get it fixed at the Car Repair Shop!
25. The firefighters from the Dramatic Play Fire Station will put out your fires for you!
Research that explains how dramatic play supports academic learning is included in every packet.
More Pretend Play Themes from Pre-K Pages
12 stories and 36 dramatic situations. Issue #61
- Material Information
- Category: Necessary book
- Published: December 12, 2018
A heroic poem, a novel in verse, scenes of folk life, a comedy in 4 acts - all these genre designations do not have any defining meaning for the reader. How does an ordinary book lover navigate the variety of genres?
The ordinary book lover never - believe me, never! - Don't get out of your comfort zone. It has its own reading history. And this story is a book in itself. It will have its happy ups and depressing failures, moments of charm and episodes for which it is a little embarrassing, words from an alien world and words for which you will fight to the end.
And one more thing - quotes with which you live.
"Happiness for everyone, for free, and let no one leave offended."
"I'll think about it tomorrow."
“Leaving already? “What, is there anything else?”
"All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
“Everything should be beautiful in a person…”
“They decided to wait and endure.”
Everyone has their own. And each has its own - understandable to him alone or generally recognized - genres. This book is in the Romeo and Juliet genre, this one is just like Cinderella, and that one over there is our famous novel in verse, an encyclopedia of Russian life.
It is believed that all stories in world literature are reduced to 12 plots and 36 dramatic situations. One can argue with this. But that is for some other time. And today we will open three new books. Although their plots are very familiar: "The Prodigal Son", "Eugene Onegin", "Deniska's Stories".
Brian Reardon. Find Jake. Arcadia, 2018.
It’s hard, it’s absolutely impossible to even imagine: one morning a father receives a text message: “There was a shootout in high school. We ask all parents, if possible, to gather at the Church of Michael, which is located opposite the Fifth Highway.
And we start running.
We've been running for a long, long time. And here we are, finally, in the church. Here all the parents of our school are familiar, unfamiliar, but all equally lost. You don't understand anything. Are you waiting.
And so the movement begins. First, the parents of those who remained alive gradually come out.
Then - those whose children died today.
And now you are left alone.
Completely alone. You don't know what's wrong with your child.
But we, we understood everything a long time ago. And while the bewildered father cannot understand anything, we almost shout: “Yes, you understand! After all, everything is obvious!”
And he understands, but does not believe.
And he begins to look for his son - after all, he was never found.
And all this time he is the father of a killer. The man who raised the monster. The one who will be hated and cursed until the end of his days.
Now forever erased from normal life. But he doesn't really care, at least not until Jake is found.
And we all shout to him: “But why can’t you get it?!”
We live with Simon Conolly and his son Jake for twenty-something days after the tragedy - and 17 years before. And all this time it seems to us that we understand more than they do. But perhaps it is the father who is right in his unconditional faith in a kind, merciful, good son?
A lump in the throat and a crazy race to an unobvious denouement. Rejection of what is happening and greed for words that rush at the reader, like animated rage. And - a saving denouement, in which nothing can be changed, nothing can be corrected.
This book is our time, as it appears to us, with its high achievements in the field of humanism and monstrous inventions in the field of the destruction of people.
We cannot predict what will happen to us tomorrow. Therefore, the story of Jake (or rather Simon) is absolutely reliable.
What should we still believe in: in obvious facts or in paternal love?
Quote:
And here Rachel can't stand it either:
- I need you, Simon. Come here as soon as possible!
– But I can't leave here, I'm waiting for Jake. I called him. He answered...or someone answered his cell phone. I…
I look up. A police officer is standing in the doorway, staring at me. I turn away, hoping that he will disappear as soon as I stop paying attention to him. That this church, these pews will disappear, melt like a bad dream. Because it's not really happening. And not with me.
- Mr. Conolly?
- What's going on there? It's Rachel again.
- Mr. Conolly!
“Nothing,” I answer my wife. - Everything is fine.
- How is it? What's the matter? Simon!
“It's all right,” I repeat again like an ass.
Now the officer is standing right in front of me.
- Please follow me, sir.
Clementine Beauvais. Is it the same Tatyana? Scooter, 2019.
Onegin is back. Now he is different - sports, parties, office work. And somewhere between metro stations he meets her, Tatyana. Ten years ago, he hung out at the dacha of his friend Lensky. And the Larins lived next door. Well, it started: she loves him, he could take advantage of this, but for some reason he slows down, and then there’s Lensky with his Olga, Olga sticks to Onegin, Lensky is furious, Onegin is about to leave ... Such a normal household plot.
And then Lensky dies. As they say now, "under unclear circumstances."
And the life of the heroes is divided into "before" and "after", although they do not show it.
10 years pass - and this meeting in the subway.
The first 40 pages you think: “Who are all these people? Where am I?" - and you feel annoyed at the restless rewriters and modernizers of the classics - “What, do you have your own plots, or something?”
Then you get sucked in and forget that this is Onegin.
And then suddenly you emerge: yes, it is he, exactly he, he cannot be any other! And you relax, and you allow yourself to be turned around, although earlier you could only allow it to Pushkin. And you know the ending, and rejoice in the ending.
Personally, my copy of the book has already gone to the public – fifteen-year-old girls fall in love and write letters to their loved ones no less and no worse (although not in French) than their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-gre... - Tatyana is here, very close, I can see her now.
As for the text, yes, it is uneven, very uneven. But here or there a fragment of a quote will flash, a philological joke - and it works, because at such a moment you are the only thread connecting "Eugene Onegin", a novel in verse, with its extreme (but not the last) readers.
Quote:
Moreover, Eugene in these afternoon hours,
Chatting with Tatyana, by no means miserable
does not feel.
For Tatyana, this is like a serious level of fitness:
His comings devastate her,
as a workout.
But they strengthen the muscles of the heart and iliac.
Every morning he thinks about Eugene,
But with Olympic heartbeat:
Like putting together a puzzle of small pieces:
Remembering his wrists, legs, knees.
Puzzle "Eugene".
From each part of the puzzle - sweet and painful a little, and spicy, like after pepper; as if little fingers had lightly pinched his heart.
Yuri Nikitinsky. Vovka, who saddled the bomb. CompassGuide, 2018.
The simplest thing is to classify this book as another "Deniska's stories" and read a small book with pleasure. Laugh, have fun, at the same time remember what wonderful stories happened in your childhood - the best childhood.
And this would certainly have been so, if not for one circumstance. It will change everything - for an adult, and will not change anything - for a child.
Because the adventures of two bosom friends Vovka and Vlady are the most important thing in this book, and everything else has nothing to do with them. Well, almost none.
They are children, and the moment of the present is important for children. You have a faithful and only friend for life - this is happiness. You have a mom and a dad. And Vovka has fish in his bucket. Why not in an aquarium? It's a whole story.
Vovka and Vladya ride bikes together, jump over a castric in a wasteland together, fry a chicken, suspect that African worms have invaded their bodies, look at the stars and go to the pet store to look at parrots and fish.
Everything starts with a pet store...
A merry sad book is one of those that make our heart bigger, kinder and smarter. Not for preschoolers. For those who read on their own. For those who remember being a child. For everyone who understands that tears shed over a book are an invaluable experience, an artifact of growing up.
Wonderful boy stories. Too bad they can't have a sequel.
Quote:
We went home without eyelashes, eyebrows and with singed forelocks. Mom yelled at me, and dad went to Vovka's dad to find out which of us was more to blame. At the same time, Vovkin's dad went to mine to find out the same thing. Neither met on the flight of stairs. They discussed something for a long time, and then went outside to a stall. They sat in the yard for half the night, each recalling their childhood and laughing for a long time. Neighbors even called the police because our dads prevented everyone from sleeping.
If someone thinks that we were swept away then, then he is greatly mistaken: Vovka was not let out for bread at all for three days, and me - only for bread and kefir.
Deniskin's stories | Magnitogorsk Drama Theater named after A.S. Pushkin
Snow-comic based on the very book that our parents loved very much in childhood
Big stage
Duration
50 minutes
Upcoming performances
There are no shows scheduled for the near future.
The performance won the Grand Prix of the II regional festival-competition of New Year's performances for children "Morozko-2020".
The performance is the owner of a special diploma in the nomination "Best dramatization" of the II regional festival-competition of New Year's performances for children "Morozko-2020".
"Deniska's stories" by the Soviet writer Viktor Dragunsky is a classic of Russian literature for children. The cycle of stories is dedicated to cases from the life of a preschooler, and then a primary school student Denis Korablev. Appeared in print since 1959 years old, the stories were repeatedly reprinted and filmed several times. They were included in the list of "100 best books for schoolchildren".
This New Year, the Magnitogorsk Drama Theater. A. S. Pushkin decided to please his audience with a performance based on the work of the same name by Viktor Dragunsky. To maintain the atmosphere of a holiday and a light frost, the choice fell on several winter stories, the careful work on which was led by the young director Konstantin Deniskin (5 minutes to a graduate of the directing department of GITIS, the course of L.
E. Kheifets, Moscow) and the artist Vyacheslav Vidanov, well known to our viewers (Moscow).
Konstantin Deniskin confessed why he chose this particular work for his debut on the professional stage:
“The book about Denis Korablev has been my favorite since early childhood. And it seems to me that it is still close to modern children, because times change, but friendship and love for parents are eternal. Whoever ceases to experience this feeling is an unfortunate person, I think so. And such people, as a rule, are already adults and do not go to the theater.
"Deniska's stories" were written by Viktor Dragunsky more than half a century ago. Of course, a lot has changed since then. But the most important thing remains clear today. Deniska had real friends, loving parents and boundless imagination, thanks to which funny situations and the most incredible incidents happen to the main characters of the play. And this is quite enough to feel truly happy in childhood.
