Role Play Archives - Page 5 of 7

Kitchen role play ideas

27/04/2011 by Cathy James 13 Comments

We’re enjoying the warm weather this week and the opportunity to play outside in the sunshine. As well as playing in their rock pool, the children have been cooking up sand pies and pebble cakes in their play kitchen. Do you have an outdoor cooking area for your kids?

As you can see, ours was improvised by the girls from a deckchair and items borrowed from our indoor home corner – a great reminder that you can encourage lots of creative play outdoors just by relocating resources from one area to another. Do you like the fire they made to heat their oven? Add in few pots and pans and they were ready to get cooking.

Play kitchens give children the opportunity to take on different roles, trying out the skills they see the adults in the family using. There’s lots of measuring and counting to be done and plenty to chat about as they prepare their meals. Providing sand, water or mud offers sensory play and science exploring, as the children combine wet and dry materials and observe how the textures change. Physical skills develop as they try out utensils and spoon and pour their ingredients. But even better than all of this, outdoor play kitchens are fun!

For more inspiring outdoor play kitchen ideas have a look at Worms Eye-View and let the children play. The Frugal Family Fun Blog has a diy travel kitchen, which you could take with you wherever you play – I’d like one made in a wipe-able oilcloth fabric which we could take with us to the beach. And Childhood 101 has a tutorial for transforming a cardboard box into a stove.

Do your children enjoy pretend cooking?

Playing with pegs

16/04/2011 by Cathy James 14 Comments

We had a great response to our posts about treasure baskets for babies and shoebox play, so I thought I’d look at another everyday item that makes a great un-toy: clothes pegs. Here’s how my children love to play with clothes pegs – and we’d love the hear some more ideas from you.

A bowl of soapy water, some clothes to wash and a washing line = a hour’s worth of contented role play. (Wish I still found so much bliss in doing laundry!)

Take a clothes peg and the contents of your making box, add some imagination and what can you make? Superheros, pirates, mermaids – have a look at our ‘how to make a peg doll‘ slide show for some more ideas.

Clothes pegs make wonderful butterflies too. Here’s how we make our clothespeg butterfly and here’s another beautiful version that My Kids Make shared with our Play Academy idea swap.

How do your children play with clothes pegs? Please share an idea (or a link) in the comments – we’d love some new ideas!

happily shared with preschool creations and abcand123 and we play and Made By You Monday and learning laboratory and the Resource Centre

How to make a wedding bouquet

13/04/2011 by Cathy James 10 Comments

It’s all about weddings at the moment. I don’t think L knows there’s a royal wedding on the way but maybe it’s just a case of love in the air because all of a sudden she wants to wear a wedding costume and dress up as a bride. And every bride needs some flowers right? Here’s our quick and easy version of how to make a wedding bouquet.

We used the same technique we used when we made our opulent tissue paper flowers for our Mothers’ Day flower craft (follow the link for full instructions). Once we had five or six flowers we simply fastened the drinking straw stems together with sticky tape and the blushing bride had her beautiful bouquet.

Easy-peasy and ever so pretty. A wedding bouquet fit for a queen!

happily shared with get your craft on and homemaker monday and inspire me monday and kids get crafty

Dressing up ideas

16/02/2011 by Cathy James 18 Comments

>>>> Download my guide to creative storytelling activities here

Do your children love dressing up?

Along with building dens, dressing up is one of our all time favourite ways to play. I wonder just why children find dressing up so much fun? I think perhaps it makes their play come to life even more if they’re kitted out in the right costume to really get into character. Mine like to match their clothes with their play sometimes – so they’ll wear a hardhat when they’re playing with the trucks – but often they like to accessorise and customise their outfits to see them through the whole day, whatever they’re playing.

If you haven’t got a dressing up box I’d definitely recommend putting one together. It doesn’t have to be an extensive wardrobe or cost a lot of money, and getting together some items can really spark your children’s play and encourage them be creative and imaginative. Here are some Dressing Up Ideas:

Ditch the Disney? Don’t feel you have to go all out for shop bought fancy dress costumes. These can be very expensive and I find the fabric, and especially any net, can be itchy and not hard wearing. They’ re also difficult to wash. Although both my two enjoy dressing up in a princess dress sometimes, I think these themed costumes can be a little limiting as all the deciding and customising has been done for you.
Gather props from your own wardrobe, grandparents and charity shops – much cheaper and I always find children enjoy getting their hands on ‘real’ grown-up stuff.
Go for simple, open ended options. Pieces of fabric and scarves provide lots of colour and texture and let your children decide what kind of costume they want to put together. These items are versatile so give lots more play options too: a piece of material can be a cape, a skirt, wings, a hat.
Think about including items from different cultures and styles of dress: headscarves, tunics, saris, and different patterned materials.
Hats are a great option as they’re so easy to for children to put on and take off by themselves, so even toddlers can join in and design their own outfit. We have woolly hats, flap caps, hardhats, sun hats, crowns and a chef’s hat.
You might like to add in some things the children can use to fasten the fabric together – kilt pins and safety pins work well as do ribbons and scarves, and my two have been known to use hair bobbles and clips too.
How about trying something a bit different and designing a costume made from newspaper?
Bear in mind your own approach to this kind of play. Dressing up is one area of play where I often see adults treating girls and boys differently. Do you offer children different costumes depending on whether they’re a boy or girl? Maybe you can have all the resources available and let the children decide who they’re going to be?

More play activities to explore story telling

Help your child to make their mark with these wonderful projects that help develop a love of writing, creative storytelling, self-confidence and compassion – along with six sets of bonus printables.

Messy play with potatoes

27/01/2011 by Cathy James 10 Comments

Here’s a simple sensory pay idea for toddlers using potatoes.

Yesterday we were printing with potatoes but there are lots of other ways you can play with them too. How about some cooking and mashing fun?

We set up a low table with lots of kitchen equipment and just explored.

We had no plan other than to investigate the potatoes and see what we could do with them.

We used some toy pans from our kitchen set and lots of ‘real’ cooking equipment too.

You can see from the photo that L loved squishing to potato with the masher.

After they’d enjoyed the sensory experience of the play the game then turned into role play, as they served the potatoes in their cafe.

This is just the kind of play we love: everyday materials, inexpensive, new things to explore, and an inviting play space set up where the children can just get stuck in and play their own way.

What I noticed from this play session was that things that we take for granted are fascinating to children. They felt very grown up chopping and peeling the potatoes, and watching the texture of the potatoes transform as we boiled them was like magic. (A good bit of science for them too looking at how a substance changes.)

Are you happy to let your children play with food?

I understand some people don’t like to include food in play because they think it’s a precious resource which shouldn’t be wasted.

My approach to all our toys and resources is to re-use and recycle as much as we can and I try not to buy something that only has a short play time span. Some food items, such as uncooked pasta, rice and lentils can be stored and used several times but obviously when you’re using cooked food this isn’t an option.

Washing off the potatoes we used to make our rabbit pictures and using them for a different kind of play is a good way to recycle them though.

Printable bird and bird house set

18/01/2011 by Cathy James 15 Comments

Valerie over at the Frugal Family Fun Blog has such great ideas and we love the crafts she does with her two girls. When we saw her post about a printable bird house play set we thought they were so cute we’d have to try and make some. The houses can be made from card, or even a recycled cereal box, and Valerie has given us all a template to use which means they are so easy to make.

B, who’s seven, managed to do all the stages by herself: tracing round the template, cutting, folding and sticking and she is really pleased with her birdhouse. She decided to leave the roof un-stuck so she could put some furniture inside and use it as a play house. The house was a little too tricky for L, who is four, to make by herself but she got involved drawing a pattern which we used to make the roof, and she’s really enjoying all the small world play now the houses are finished. We made some extra houses to hang in the window as decorations too and for these we stuck the roofs down. I think the co-ordinating roofs and perches make this a very stylish neighbourhood! We used recycled wrapping paper to make them but they’d be the perfect way to re-use your children’s art work too.

Printable bird template

Of course then we decided we needed someone to come and live in our bird street so we made a little flock of birds. If you’d like to make some the same as ours you can use this Printable bird template, which works out a great size to match with Valerie’s bird house. All you need to do is draw round the bird template on card, adding a slit where you can insert the wings. The wings are made from a piece of paper folded into a concertina and pushed through the slot in the bird’s body. You can make a hole above the wings if you want to hang them up on a cotton thread, or add a base so they can stand up if you’d like to play with them. You’ll find both options available on the template.

We used the same paper for the birds wings as we did the roofs of the houses, so it turned out to be a good matching game too, making sure all the birds got back to their own house. A big thank you to Valerie for the idea and the how-to bird house template. If you don’t already know the Frugal Family Fun Blog do pop by for a visit as I know you will love her ideas.

happily shared with Kids Get Crafty, Upcycled Awesome and Works for me Wednesday and Preschool Corner and Craft Schooling Sunday and No Time For Flashcards and Making Mondays Marvellous and and Mad Skills and Mad Skills Monday and Made by You Monday and Homemaker Monday and Sumo’s Sweet Stuff and Today’s Creative Blog and ABC and 123 and Something for the Weekend

>>>> Download my guide to creative storytelling activities here

More play activities to explore story telling

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