I love dramatic play (or what we call 过家家 in Chinese, which means “playing house” or “playing grown up”) since young. It has been amazing since my little boys came along, now that I have the best play companions ever to relive and actualize my childhood imaginations. It brings me great joy to see my little boys enjoying and learning in these play spaces I have created, be it previously at work or in our home, old and new. It has also been very encouraging to read the positive comments from like-minded “playful” mommies from the online community, so here is our first post to share more details about our first dramatic play space in our new home, that’s the FARMER’S MARKET!

When children pretend, they’re using their imaginations to move beyond the bounds of reality.

We all love the IKEA play kitchen and there is no end to it’s possibilities since turning it around, inspired by the many wonderful ideas online. In our first dramatic play set-up, the IKEA play kitchen was our cashier counter for farmer’s market!

Most of the props used in this play set-up was from our previous play kitchen. I kept away the cooking utensils and got more rattan baskets and shopping bags from my favorite store, DAISO! To make the play experience more authentic and to draw closer connection to the real word, we used a combination of foam and felt fruits and vegetables that looked so real my younger boy almost bit into one of the apples.

To encourage writing and learning of numerical concepts, I discussed the price chart with my older one and invited him to draw and write the price tags of some products. He wrote $2 and $1 for a handful of mushrooms and strawberries respectively. Sadly, I did not take any shots of the price tags before they were destroyed in play (it happens and it is perfectly alright). We kept the price numbers small to make the additions and subtractions manageable for a five-year-old. The process of buying and selling certainly presented a good opportunity to reinforce the concept of money and practise addition and subtraction.

While at play, we also encouraged my older boy to converse in Mandarin to practise saying the names of the fruits and vegetables in Chinese.

So, what else did we have at our stall? There were apples, pears, pineapples, carrots, radishes, pumpkins, strawberries, cabbages, etc, colorful enough for color grouping fun with my younger boy. I have been doing a lot of matching activities with my younger one, hence I was pleasantly surprised and yet not surprised to see him intuitively picking and matching fruits and vegetables to the illustrations on the price chart.

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We kept and stuffed some old newspapers into our monster cookie box to keep its shape and included it as a product from our farmer’s market. Loved, and still love these mini ziploc bags in the design of jug from Daiso! Popped in pom pom balls and we had fruit candies for sales as well!

The old house used to be cluttered with toys. The boys were spoilt for choice and ended up feeling bored from not knowing what to play. Now that we have the chance to reorganise the learning resources and toys in our new house, adhering to the principle that “less is more”, we kept away most of the stuffs and only brought out a few each time, and surprisingly, they could play with them longer. We kept the farmer’s market dramatic play set-up for close to a month, and the grand plan is to have a new theme each month for now, so stay around and look forward to more sharing of our play experience! Do drop by our Instagram @tiffany_basket too!