Gift Wrap Dramatic Play

I've been trying to come up with a few more dramatic play "stations" for the kids. They offer so many great avenues for engaged learning and from what I understand from my Kindergarten teacher friends even Sask school systems are leaning more and more towards dramatic play and interest based learning in K.

On our agenda this week was to create a Gift Wrap Play station and a Mail and Post Office station.  Christmas is in less than a week and so both were relevant to life as we're finishing up the last of our wrapping and trying to START getting our Christmas cards mailed out! Oi.

I saw this great idea on Teach Preschool to wrap metal tins and cookie sheets and add magnets to bows. Genius! I just cut up a magnetic hockey schedule (sorry Bruins) and hot glued them to the bottom of the bows.



The kids could then decorate the packages with bows and deliver them.



I also cut up some index cards and wrote "To" and "From" on them. I explained that we label our gifts and what to and from meant. They decorated the tags with stickers and added them to their packages.



The boy one got lots of practice writing his name as he wrote his name in the "From" section on all of his gifts.


The girl one has just learned to write the first letter of her name - H! She excited signed all of hers with said H and 20 stickers. (She also had just had a bath and I didn't brush her hair).



A few boxes I wrapped a lid and box separately so they could add toys and odd items as gifts.



 Before they came to the table I had pre-cut a few pieces of wrapping paper and had a stock of boxes from the recycling reinforced and stacked on the table. They each then got to wrap their own presents.
I showed them a few of the basics and let them go at it. It was interesting that I had to teach that each piece of tape had to touch either both sides of the paper or the paper and the box.





 The boy one liked his presents pretty clean and simple. The girl one liked them heavily adorned.



We received piles of stickers from the ladies that work with the tall one at the Post Office.



Their stack of presents all wrapped.


I didn't really want to let them open their presents but what's the fun in that? So they started tearing into them.

It was cute. They exclaimed things like "Oh look, cake! Thank you."
and "I got tissue. Yay!"





The kids had a blast wrapping and giving gifts. Can't wait to play it some more.

Comments

  1. That's a really great idea! Especially since little kids can get so caught up in the flurry of Christmas presents and can sound really ungrateful... like "I don't want to be done, I want more presents!" Ha. I'm going to do this with my kids today! We also have a birthday set up with balloons, Melissa and Doug bday cake/candles, streamers and gift bags. They decorate, throw a party, give random gifts to the birthday person, sing Happy Birthday and then do it all over again for the next child. It's fun :)

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  2. Very imaginative idea. Role modelling very important. It is sometimes difficult for younger children to give away the birthday/xmas gift but here they have had lots of fun and no anxiety.
    Thank you regards
    involved Grandma
    Janine

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  3. Very cute! It's awesome you're teaching them these important things early on in their lives.
    Liz
    http://liz-makes.blogspot.com/

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