If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that the dramatic play center is one of our very favorites! We change the center every month for about 2-3 weeks. The other 2 weeks it is a generic housekeeping center.
Now that we are all settled into a new school year, our first dramatic play center is a Restaurant. We like to do this one first because all of our students have been to restaurants and are familiar with them.
We often use different pieces of play equipment in creative ways to make the dramatic play center. In this restaurant, we turned our puppet theatre into a hostess station. The 2 signs are reversible.
The back of the puppet theatre has a basket with menus and ordering pads.
One of the most important parts of setting up a great dramatic play center is creating role play name tags. We find that with these name tags, our students are easily able to get into “character” and there is very little bickering about who gets to cook, who gets to run the cash register, and who gets to take the orders.
We have 3 sets of kid-friendly picture menus: Breakfast, Lunch and Dessert. They are laminated and we use a different menu each week to keep it interesting. The picture menus make it easy for the students to decide exactly what they want to eat.
The waiters take orders either on an ordering pad (from the office supply store) or on these little order forms that we copy to coordinate with each menu.
To make the tables in our housekeeping center look more like a restaurant, we add table cloths, jars of silk flowers, and table numbers. In the dress-up closet, we add aprons and chef’s hats. This chef is serving food directly to the table.
Our students love this center. Even my own children come home from elementary school and want to play restaurant at the preschool!
All of the signs, menus, and order forms are available in this set. We’d love to see pictures of your class playing restaurant too! Post them on our Facebook page!!
Find LOTS of Dramatic Play inspiration and ideas HERE:
Have fun playing and learning with your children today!
Be sure to follow Play to Learn Preschool on Pinterest to see all of our ideas:
This is wonderful! Would be a nice addition to our role playing.
Thanks Natasha! It's definitely one of our favorites.
I love all the print exposure in this pretend play set up – looks like a lot of fun!
Thanks Emma! The students always do well when they have to read and write for real purposes, don't they? 🙂
My little waitress LOVES the restaurant center! She gets in the car each day and that is the first thing she will tell me about. This morning as I was brushing her hair and getting ready she said, "Mommy … I don't know what I'm going to do today for centers. Oh! Wait! I will go to the restaurant and play there!!"
My Kinders love this and so do I! We added a few waste aprons from the housewares dept at Wal-Mart (only $2 each!) and we were all set! I featured you in my Sunday Spotlight blogpost as one of my new favorite TPT teachers! Thanks for the great resources! http://www.21stcenturyky.blogspot.com
I love this set! My daughter is asking for things to "play restaurant" for Christmas and your printables are going to be a lifesaver for me! I will be heading to TPT to purchase the download – thank you for sharing! Is there any way you can tell me the font you used for the food items listed on the menus? I want to make her a matching name badge since this set is just for her. 🙂 THANKS!!