Learning through play in Kindergarten: Part 1 – Christmas Bakeshop

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It’s a magical time for learning through play in kindergarten! Last year, our kindergarten students enjoyed using the class dollhouse with Christmas-themed figures, my kindies are currently building Bethlehem, and last year our class was turning the ‘house center’ into Santa’s Bake shop! This post is the first of Christmas learning through play in Kindergarten.

Christmas Bakeshop:

I worked with a gifted Early Childhood Educator, we’ll call her Ms. R, who put her heart and soul into co-creating a Santa’s bakeshop with our students. She made a beautiful gingerbread house to surprise the kids before they came in one morning. Our students were so excited when they saw it, the baking sheets, mixer, cash register and elf costumes! They could hardly contain themselves through morning announcements!

The introduction:

Part 1: Baking cookies, things in the center

Ms. R brainstormed ideas with them, provided just-their-size baking appliances, utensils, cookie and cupcake pans, aprons, bowls and and even a mini espresso machine! She spoke to them about their own experiences baking, and brought students up to model:

• mixing dough
• putting batter on the cookie sheet, or in cupcake pans
• using oven mitts for pans going in and out of oven
• lifting cookies off cookie sheet and onto plate

She then pointed out that cookies could be decorated, and they talked about pretending to decorate with sprinkles and frosting.

Part 2: Playing with and learning about using money

Our students loved using the cash register and play money. They understood that money was exchanged for baked goods, and just used pennies and made up their own prices. This was great counting practice, and it was interesting to see where students placed the most value!

 

Senior kindergarten students had been brought up to role play the procedure after a number of students were given opportunities to share their own experiences out at bakeries or coffee shops. I wish I had more photos of this to share. I will update this post when I do this with my new class this year.

Part 3: Guidelines for social regulation, where they took it, flexibility!

Those playing in the center would have to decide who was a baker, cashier, elf, Santa, Mrs. Claus, customer. There were tags and costumes so the roles were clear. It was a great opportunity for them to sort out who would be first in the roles they valued most, make compromises and negotiate fair play.

At a certain point, a number of our students expressed wanting to take home ‘what they baked’ to their families, so I put some Christmas clip-art together and photocopied it for them to color and paste onto paper plates.

The closer we got to the holidays, and the more time constraints and (let’s be real) tired students became an issue, I realized it just made more sense to copy the cookies onto construction paper. We were surprised at how pretty they were!  

I learned a lot from observing my students’ play in the Christmas bakery, particularly about how capable they can be in negotiating roles, taking turns, role playing, oral language, counting and using numbers, drawing and writing. If we have taught it, modeled it, reinforced it positively, we need to get out of their way and just observe what they can do with it. And it’s really something to see!

Here is my North Pole bakery dramatic play resource that includes the art for printing the cookies, along with write-the-room, and coloring pages related to this center! Our students did not actually use the signs (middle picture, below) because they made their own. Every group is different, so the option is there. 

Stay tuned for an update to this post, and future posts in the series! Best wishes to all of you as we prepare for the holiday season!

 

 

 

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