The Playful Preschool Series theme this week is book celebration. We try to celebrate books every day in our house! My boys had so much fun coming up with and executing this idea.
Dramatic Play- Library
Why We Chose This Activity
A few weeks ago we visited the Magic House in St. Louis and my boys had a great time playing librarians and patrons in their library room. It was a kid sized room full of all the things you would find at the library.
My kids have wanted to recreate the room at home so since this week’s theme was book celebration we decided it was perfect timing.
Setting Up
Materials Needed: lots of books, 2 free printables (found below), chairs, tables, play phone, real cell phone, and basket or box
1. Arrange the books on shelves or create a book display. My kids faced the books out on the couch of those that were new releases.
2. Set up a return books area and a check out area. Use these free printable library signs to label your areas. You will want to include a return basket or box. We used a laundry basket. Have a play phone available to take patron calls. The cell phone set to camera makes a fun scanner for checking books in and out of the library.
3. Print and cut these free library cards.
4. Add any other areas to make your library unique. My oldest son wanted a Lego club just like our library so we had a section set up for that activity. We also added bean bags for a story time activity.
Time to Play
My kids played most of the day in their library. They took turns being the librarian and patron. I also pretended to call in and order books for them to hold on the reserved shelf.
When they tired of shelving books, we had fun in our Lego club.
Then, we gathered the stuffed animals for story time.
They had so much fun and wanted me to take pictures to show the librarians the next time we visit the real library!
Related Posts
Keep reading. Visit the links below for more great book celebration ideas from the #playfulpreschool team!
I can’t wait to try this with my son! Especially now that we’ve been going to library storytime each week, I think he’ll have lots of ideas.
Yay, enjoy!
This is so much fun! My son would love it. Thanks for the printables too. That makes setting this up even easier!
What a fun dramatic play activity. Our kids would love this. We will have to give it a try.
I wanted to do a fun library setup but didn’t get to it. I am printing up library cars today for this weekend .
This is so much fun and it was one of my favourite things to do as a child – a lot of mine and my husband books that we have kept still have our ticket holders and date of return pages that we stuck in inside them from our childhood.