Dramatic play with hats is an activity we've done many times before (nothing's easier than taking a bunch of hats out of the closet and letting the kids have fun with them), but I haven't blogged about it yet, so I thought I'd share.. Today we read
Caps for Sale by Ephyr Slobodkina. We have an audio version that has sound effects and songs in it, and L and E (almost 3) love to sing along. After the story, we did a number of activities. I contemplated printing out some of the free printables for this book, but playing with hats sounded like a lot more fun than doing worksheets! So here's what we did...
I pulled out some hats from the closet for the kids to try on and explore. They especially liked trying on Daddy's hats because he usually doesn't let them touch his things. Then we wanted to see how many hats we could balance on our heads (just like the peddler in the story):
Yes, there really is a little girl under all those hats! (and E is pretending to be a monkey). I challenged the girls to walk across the room with all the hats on their heads, and laughter ensued.
Then we pulled out some toy monkeys and re-enacted the story. We played a game of Monkey-See-Monkey-Do, which is basically Simon Says. L enjoyed making up moves for us to copy (she's the
bossy one natural leader).
Even Baby H had some fun trying on hats, which promptly ended up in his mouth.
I stepped back and let the girls be creative in their dramatic play, and it was fabulous watching them interact with each other and come up with all sorts of interesting things to do with the hats. Easy and fun!
Thank you for blogging about this! It may seem simple, but I have trouble thinking of practical activities like this to go with books. Not my gift :) I have three children as well, except all boys so active games like this that go along with books are always fun. We are studying this book this week in our "book club" (basically several families with boys the same age, we read the books all week and do activities individually and then get together once every couple weeks to do activities about the book together and play) I am going to have everyone bring some hats and we are going to use your ideas to play some active games! Thank you again!
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