Camping Dramatic Play Center
This Camping Dramatic Play Center helps kids learn about camping and engage in pretend play. It’s suitable for kids in Pre-K, Preschool and Kindergarten, although I’m sure older children will love it too!
Camping Dramatic Play
I absolutely LOVED creating this Camping dramatic play center and I’m sure the kiddos will love it!
Preparation – Begin by printing and laminating the resources that best suit your needs. Next, set up your base camp and backdrop. For mine I used a navy blue plastic tablecloth as the sky and painted some green trees on a large piece of butchers paper. After that, I added in my basic camping elements such as a tent (from Target), camping chairs (from Bunnings) and fire. To make the fire I cut two long Christmas wrapping paper rolls in half and arranged them in a campfire formation. I taped them together and added some crepe paper for the fire. I used some basic printables to begin with such as the campground banner, map and welcome sign.
Camping Dramatic Play Center
Camping Dramatic Play – Areas to Set Up
I love mixing up my dramatic play centers, so with this one I started off with the campground. Then changed it slightly to become other areas such as a picnic area, ranger’s office, fishing lake and hiking trail. This works particularly well if you have a small space for your pretend play center.
Most of the areas can be set up with mainly the printables, but you’ll probably want to add a few props such as a tent, table, clip boards and campfire. I’ve been collecting props for dramatic play centers for years, so I also rummaged through my teaching resources to pull out some things that were relevant such as a quilt I’d made, picnic basket (from Target), wooden logs (ordered online) and cute stuffed animals (from Kmart).
Camping Dramatic Play Center
For the fishing lake, I just used some blue pillow cases which I also ended up using as the teddy bear’s sleeping bags. I found the printable camp food really easy to make. I just taped the sausages and marshmallows to popsicle sticks.
Camping – Hiking Trail
One of my favorite parts of this dramatic play center is the hiking trail. You can display the real photos of animals and then the kids can record the animals they find on the “Animal Spotting” printable. I’ve included quite a few write on printables such as a Ranger’s Report and Check in log. These are a fun way to add some reading and writing activities to each area.
You can learn more about the other printables included by checking out the link below. Happy camping!
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