Materials
- Dress-up clothes and accessories for all seasons
- Newspaper
- White paper
- Clear packing tape
- Camping gear (real or play)
- Summer gear, such as beach towels; pool toys; empty, clean sunscreen bottles; and so on
- Plastic rakes
- Plastic, silk, or die-cut fall leaves
What to do
1. Choose a day or week to set up each season in the Dramatic Play center.
2. Set up the seasonal play as follows:
- Winter: Put out boots, snow suits, gloves, mittens, hats, scarves, and coats. Make snowballs by scrunching up newspaper into different size balls and covering them with white paper and clear packing tape. Encourage the children to stack them, roll them, or toss them while dressed for cold weather.
- Spring: Set up a camping center with backpacks, canteens, pots and pans, cans of beans, binoculars, rope flashlights, and a tent. If you do not have a real or play tent, make one from a sheet.
- Summer: Encourage the children to pretend they are going to the beach or the pool. Give the children towels, empty sunscreen bottles, pool toys, goggles, diving sticks, and beach chairs. You could even play some "Beach Boys" music for a fun touch.
- Fall: Rake, rake, rake the leaves! Put a bunch of pretend leaves and plastic rakes into the Dramatic Play center and the children will have a great time raking and dumping the leaves.
-Gail Morris, Keman, TX
Instructions
1. Do this activity with four children.
2. Fill the sand and water table with yellow, orange, and brown shredded paper
strips to represent hay.
3. Hide the white plastic eggs in the "hay."
4. Laminate four hen patterns or cover them with clear contact paper. Tape
them to the insides of the four inner walls of the sand and water table. This
will indicate to the children where they should stand.
5. Give one basket to each child. Encourage the four children to look for five
eggs each.
6. After they have found them, hide the eggs in the "hay" again and ask four
different children to play.
