Grocery Store - Shop Smart

This month, our preschoolers enjoyed being customers at our "Shop Smart" grocery store in the dramatic play center.  I blogged about this center last year, so this year I thought I would put together a 6 step "How To" guide for setting up your own grocery store.

In my opinion, the grocery store (as well as the restaurant) is one of the best dramatic play centers if you are just getting started.  Children go to the grocery store all the time!  They have likely been doing it every week for their entire lives.  Because it is so familiar, the role playing comes very naturally.

Here are 6 helpful hints for setting up your own "Shop Smart" store:

The kids love this!  About a week before the center is scheduled to debut, I ask the children to go home and gather up all of their empty (clean) recycling containers.  They bring them in and we stock the shelves with "real" groceries!

Each dramatic play center needs to have 1 main component -- a centerpiece that makes it look and feel different from the regular housekeeping center.  At the grocery store, it's the carts and the cash registers.  If you do not have these toys in your classroom, ask your families if anyone has one that you can borrow.  The chances are good that they do.

We are always looking for ways to maximize learning in the dramatic play center.  Make it a print rich environment by providing paper for the children to write shopping lists, sales flyers for finding the best bargains, and coupons for cutting practice.

If your children love to shop as much as ours do, Shop Smart is going to be a very busy place during center time.  Help the children keep it organized by labeling everything.  Not only does it increase the print in the center, it provides opportunities for your students to practice organization and sorting.

Name tags are a key component in every dramatic play center.  Provide these job assignments to help children take on different roles, to mitigate the bickering about the cash registers, and to help everyone find a way to participate and play.

In college, we had to write all of our lesson plan's using Madeline Hunter's template.  One of the key sections of the plan was to provide an "Anticipatory Set" for each lesson.  The same principle of getting kids excited to play can be used in preschool.  I always introduce a center by presenting a problem such as: "We don't have anything to eat for lunch today.  What are we going to do?"  When the kids suggest going to the store, we make a list together and then head to dramatic play.  They always take over from there, but it helps to get them all thinking about the grocery store.

Have you ever set up a grocery store in your dramatic play center?  What are your best tips and tricks?  Please share!

Here are a few affiliate links, just for your convenience, to the types of toys that we have:

    

You can find all of the signs, labels and shopping lists that I use in this set:

Have fun playing and learning with your children today!