Cafe Role Play!

 Poppet had spontaneously been imagining her kitchen as a Cafe for a few days, fruitlessly trying to order 'pizza' from Little, so I decided to set the area up as a mini Cafe. This role play scene has been providing some brilliant opportunities for learning through play in areas like language development and emergent writing skills, but more importantly it has been teaching her manners! When I visit her cafe I get ushered to a seat and then my seat pushed in for me! And there is a lot of "please", "thankyous", "there you go's, "bit hot" and "is that nice?" being scattered about in her speech.

Poppet helped me create some menu's for her little cafe (or tafee as she calls it). I have been trying to provide different opportunities for her emergent writing to flourish, for her to see writing has a purpose and that it conveys a message. I am starting to put together a writing set for her with things like old cheque books that I will blog about soon. So in any role play set ups that we do I will try and incorporate writing in some form. There are lots more ideas for encouraging children to write during play here. I asked her what foods we should include in our menu and her answers of 'pizza', 'milkshake' and 'cheese toasties' make her diet sound a lot worse than it is! She made her own little menu as well, making sure she wrote on each side of the piece of paper. I also made a 'Cafe' sign for the kitchen (Poppet wanted to make one too but Little got a hold of it).

Together we set up her desk like a table, dressing it with a tablecloth, a jam jar of flowers, a little basket of condiments, sugar bowl and milk jug and our menus.

Inside her kitchen playhouse corner I made a little 'till' area, using milk bottle tops with numbers written on them as our currency and her little laptop (a christmas gift I very much regret buying her now, it was a bad choice) as a till. High on my list of toys that I would like for the girls is a proper toy till, it would get so much use. 

The finished scene looked very inviting and I couldn't wait to get playing with it myself!

Poppet started off being the customer, so she watched me curiously as I sat her down at the table and pushed her seat in and gave her a menu. She made sure 'Bobo' also had a seat and a menu to peruse.

After that though her favourite thing was to be waitress, going back and forth from the table to the little kitchen, bringing you things you hadn't ordered, 'tidying up' (she's not a fan of mess) and doing the dishes. Bobo is a regular customer at the cafe and she is always very attentive. This is Bobo and I being treated to an egg dinner. In the background Poppet is putting the toast on.

At some point Poppet came to the conclusion that she needed to be wearing her apron for her cafe duties; this is her doing the dishes and restocking her ingredients cupboard.

It is lovely to be able to play with her in this way as it's the first time we have set up a role play scene. She is desperate for Little to be able to join in but unfortunately Little is more interested in trying to pull the tablecloth off the table and playing with the 'money'. Poppet tries so hard to involve her, asking her to 'make milkshake' and trying to get her to sit in the seat, it will be nice for her when Little is more of a playmate but I don't want to wish their lives away! One thing that didn't get much usage, from Poppet at least, was the money side of the cafe. I think she is too used to real money so the milk bottle lids didn't capture her imagination.

Poppet: 2 yrs 6mos

Little: 9 mos