Play-Based Learning Pizza Party!

My kindergarten boys and girls are very enthusiastic participants in their play, and we have been developing our own play plans since before Christmas. However, their play was becoming very repetitive without a lot of opportunity to infuse new literacy and numeracy learning. So I posed the question, "What would you think about changing the play house to something else? Maybe a restaurant or a grocery store?"

Well they immediately seized upon the idea of a restaurant--and not just any restaurant, Boston Pizza, which had just opened in a nearby town this past fall! That afternoon during play time, we dragged everything out of the house and made decisions about what to put back to support our restaurant play. We included the kitchen, a table and chairs, dishes and cutlery, food, aprons, and chef hats. We added a host/hostess desk and a chalkboard to print specials on. We made a list of supplies we needed and how we would get them, things we needed to do, and jobs in the restaurant.

Within a few minutes, the restaurant opened to a very enthusiastic reception. And since I wanted to see growth in our play, we talked a lot about what purposeful play looked like versus "off track" play.

So how did I take this from play to play-based learning?

First of all, we decided on a menu.

1) Writing

Having a restaurant provided the perfect opportunity for a lot of authentic writing opportunities. We learned how to make lists for taking orders and buying food for the restaurant.

Examples feature printing all sounds, initial, medial, and final consonants.

Making menus proved to be a perfect activity to further develop our ability to caption pictures and spell words. I printed off a variety of pictures from the Boston Pizza menu (sorry for the copyright infringement BP). It was really exciting to observe my young learners' attempts to spell the menu items depicted in the pictures. We worked hard to stretch out words and print all the sounds we heard, referring to our names and the alphabet chart for extra help. It was a great way to practice the "ch" sound, as we had both chicken fingers and chocolate milk on our menus.  A great connection to numeracy was made as well--we set prices for the items on our menu and talked about what would be a reasonable price to charge. The boys and girls learned to print the dollar sign, and printed numbers from 1-100 (and some wanted millions) as we made our menus. It was especially exciting to laminate them so they looked like real menus. 

Numeracy: Taking orders in a restaurant led to some great opportunities to count and represent numbers. We made up all kinds of story problems for the restaurant and practiced adding, subtracting, and printing numbers. We printed numbers on the SMART Board and students printed numbers on their own pie plates on lapdesks (aluminum pie plates (the disposable variety) are a great teacher hack for individual whiteboards). We also did one-to-one matching as we surveyed our classmates and asked what they would order in the restaurant. After we practiced using these order forms, we printed them for use in the restaurant with clipboards. 

Our pizza restaurant play was also a fantastic opportunity for inquiry. Throughout our play, we kept track of the questions we had about restaurants. In fact, we even decided to call the general manager of Boston Pizza Virden to ask if we could come for a visit and ask her our questions in person.

We were so excited when she said yes, and next thing we knew, we were off to Virden for a field trip! At this point, it worked nicely to pull in social studies outcomes on our community and community helpers. Take a look at our movie showing our morning of fun and learning at Boston Pizza Virden!

 Boston Pizza very generously gave us a whole bunch of take out containers, and when we returned from our field trip, our play took on an entirely different level. As the boys and girls were more familiar with the jobs in a restaurant, their play reflected this and it was fascinating to watch. They also learned about the important ways that restaurants use literacy and numeracy (for example, the adults wanted a pizza that was half and half with toppings). It was a wonderful topic to investigate, and a trip to a real pizza restaurant made it even better! A huge thank you to Jillian Irvine at Boston Pizza Virden and my grandmas/mom drivers who made it happen!

Shopping for Learning

I'm very fortunate to have an elevated loft area in my classroom that I usually use for dramatic play. Children of all ages are instantly attracted to this loft and it's the first place they want to go as soon as they enter the classroom. Throughout the years it has served many purposes such as reading loft, vet clinic, post office, hospital, castle, and Santa's Workshop. I used to spend hours planning the next dramatic play centre and collecting the supplies, and setting everything up perfectly for the students' arrival the next morning. Now I do something a little different that makes the students part of the process from the beginning. I think the learning is richer with more curricular connections, less teacher-directed, and more enjoyable for both the students and me.

Now when it is time for a new dramatic play centre, I ask the students what they would like to do. We discuss the supplies we have and what we have done in the past--sometimes this leads to a repeat of a favourite centre or the development of a new one. This month, the students decided that they would like a grocery store. We hadn't done a grocery store in a few years, so I knew we'd need to develop it from the ground up. Here's what we've been doing!

Our first job was to decide what we needed for the centre and how we would get it. The students decided that a note in our clipboards and a post on the classroom Facebook page would let all our parents know that we were collecting clean grocery items. We also wrote a note to our custodian and asked him to get our shopping cart out of the storage hut. We visited our school's resource room to get paper money and coins to use in our grocery store, and found wallets and handbags in our tub of dress up clothes. Then we waited for the grocery items to roll in!

The next kindergarten day, a number of families sent in bags of empty grocery items, much to the students' and my delight! This led to a number of teacher-directed learning activities, such as sorting the grocery items (healthy/not healthy, breakfast/lunch/supper, dairy/not dairy, etc) and pricing the items for our store. The students loved pricing items. We used sticky notes and tape, and learned about the dollar and cent symbols. Priced varied widely (great deals and not so great deals) but the students enjoyed consulting flyers, setting prices, and printing the numbers. It was such an authentic opportunity for students to practice their number printing skills!

That afternoon the "Kindergarten Co-op" held its grand opening. There was no shortage of customers and soon the shelves were empty. It was so interesting to watch as the students played a number of roles--customer, clerk, grocery bagger, child, pet, etc. The students loved their new play centre!

Over the next few days, we added more items to our grocery store, and used the grocery items for some numeracy learning experiences. All students were given a number of loonies (for the dollar items) and pennies (for the cent items) and moved from item to item to match the number of coins with the price on the grocery item. It was a great number recognition, counting, and matching activity!

Learning how to make a list was an ELA learning experience that we engaged in yesterday. We read flyers to decide what we wanted to buy, then developed a grocery list on the SMART Board through shared writing.

After this lesson, blank grocery lists were made available in the grocery store. It was fascinating to observe all the different levels of writing development, from random symbols and squiggles that represented writing to initial and final consonants and some CVC words.

A few students have mentioned more writing that needs to be done, such as an open/closed sign. A field trip to the grocery store in town will likely result in some new material for dramatic play as well--I anticipate that we will explore basic needs and wants from the social studies curriculum and reusable vs. plastic bags to support our environmental citizenship initiatives. The opportunities to develop important early numeracy and literacy skills through dramatic play are many! We will capitalize on those in the coming weeks as the grocery store evolves to reflect student interest and ideas.