Dramatic Play Activities with Flower Shop: Ideas for the Preschool Classroom

Dramatic Play Activities with Flower Shop: Ideas for the Preschool Classroom
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The Flower Shop

Dramatic play helps to develop children’s creativity and imaginations. A flower shop play area will let them experience adult activities like working in a store and shopping for flowers as they pretend to arrange, order and deliver flowers to their classmates.

A flower shop dramatic play area can be a part of many different preschool themes. It is a great addition to themes about flowers, gardens, spring and plants, but it works well with many others too. Florists and flowers are important to many holidays. Try adding a flower shop when you have a Valentine’s Day or Easter theme. To make it more seasonal add some empty candy heart boxes and old valentine cards. For Easter add some baskets to put flowers in or some old straw hats to decorate. Since we send flowers for many occasions, you could also make a florist shop a part of your unit about feelings.

There are lots of items you can add to your dramatic play area to create a pretend flower shop. Provide artificial flowers and plants, vases and pots, misting bottles, watering cans and small cards to put on flower arrangements. Tissue paper and ribbon can also be used for decorating their arrangements. You can also provide a cash register with play money, aprons, and a notebook and pencil for taking orders.

Encourage your students to make and deliver flower arrangements. You might let them make centerpieces for decorating the lunch table, science table or your desk. Students can also shop for flowers and give them to friends. Preschoolers will have lots fun shopping and working in a flower shop.

Activities

Here are some fun ideas for activities that you can set up in your preschool flower shop dramatic play area or as a separate center.

  • Flower Sorting Provide your students with a variety of artificial flowers for sorting activities. They can practice sorting them by color, type, number of petals or any other way they can think of.

  • Counting Flowers To practice counting place five or sixes vases in your center. Put a number on each vase and encourage the children to count out that many flowers and arrange them in the vase.

  • Flower Observations For a science activity place real flowers and hand lenses in your center. Encourage your preschoolers to use the magnifying glasses to observe the parts of the flowers. Provide a diagram of a flower that labels the roots, leaves, stems, petals, etc and challenge the students to find as many of the parts as they can. Put several types of flowers out so they can compare them.

  • Tissue Paper Flowers Teach your students how to make flowers with pipe cleaners and tissue paper**.** Then place the materials at your center. The flowers the children make can be added to the flower shop area.

Your preschool students will have so much fun with your flower shop dramatic play area that you’ll want to use it all year long!