April showers bring May FLOWERS! Spring is the perfect time to do some rearranging in your playroom and add some fun activities for your little one. Creating a mini flower shop, is a fun way to practice so many learning skills through play!
I turned our Ikea Play kitchen into this adorable flower shop quite inexpensively . My daughter has spent hours playing with it so far and it's been a great quality time activity for her and I to play with while her sister naps.
Here is what I did to create this little flower market in our playroom!
1. Out with the old and in with the new! I cleared all the play food out of the kitchen centre and packed it away for future use . I also gave the kitchen centre a gos wipe down.
2. I took some time to think about what would best encourage open ended play and learning in the flower shop. What skills did I want the centre to encourage and how could I tailor that to fit my daughter's age and skill level?
I wanted to introduce the concept of money and counting practice. This was an easy element to include, as
we already had a Montessori style coin box. I simply made price tags to attach to the flowers and placed the coin box on the flower stand!
The coin box we have is from one of the LOVEVERY playlets so it's a great way to utilize something you might already have. It only has five coins , but I have found that's plenty for my three year old. She loves telling me how much each order comes to and has even been able to do very simple addition with some help!
I also wanted to include a colour sorting activity, with colour's that are specific to flowers. We have worked on learning the colours: Teal , Magenta , Violet , Periwinkle and a few other obscure colours related to flowers!
Creating some order forms was a great was to incorporate colours, shapes and numbers! I created these in Canva , then simply printed and laminated them. If you want to skip the creation step.....
I have a printable flower shop dramatic play bundle available for download here! It includes everything I used in our flower shop setup.
3. This leads me to the next point, I thought about how I could make the overall aesthetic appealing to look at. This is the 90's anymore....primary colours are out and muted pastel tones are in. I wanted to create a flower centre that was visually appealing for me and inviting for my toddler.
I decided to go with yellow, teal/mint-ish green and white. These colours lended themselves well, as we already had the yellow coin box and many of the dollar store items I pushed fit this theme.
4. Choose your flowers and other items to stock your flower shop with! Here is a list of everything I decided to include:
Teal watering can- Dollarama
White Bird House- Dollarama
White Bird- Micheals
Paper Flower Pots- Micheals
Tin Flower Pot- Dollarama
Teal Flower Pots -Dollarama
Teal Timer Clock - Lovevery play kits
Coin Box- Lovevery Play Kits
Garden Gloves- Dollarama
Flowers and Plants- Dollarama
All Printable Materials- Planning To Mom
Dry Erase Markers- Staples
Recycled strawberries containers
I tried to keep this as budget friendly as possible. I think the whole object cost me $25 total, maybe an extra few dollars for the lamination sheets.
You could make your flower shop as fancy or simple as you want!
5. Consider incorporating some other flower/spring themed toys and activities to the playroom
Adding some new spring/flower themed activities is a great addition to the flower shop. I started by making a bird house building sensory bin (my daughter is obsessed with bird houses). This bin was super easy to pull together and low mess!
This simple bin has: a bird bath, building blocks for "building birdhouses" , birds , eggs , nest , rocks and a few flowers.
This little bin kept my daughter busy for nearly 40 minutes ...with a toddler that's a big win!
These printable garden building sheets were a great addition too! Again I created them in Canva, printed , laminated and added velcro dots. These were a great sorting activity that fit the flower theme. She loved "designing" her own garden !
These printables are available for download here if you want ti skip creating something in Canva .
Lastly, I setup shelf work activities that related to spring . Keep in mind this setup was for a 10 month old and 3 year old . You could add whatever activity that best suit your child's skill level .
Many of these items were form the Lovevery play kits . I was trying to use things we already had on hadn't to keep the cost down.
With so many toy options out there these days the sky is the limit !
To wrap things up....if you are looking for a good spring/summer unit study....flowers are a great choice! There are so many ways to create fun activities for your toddler, a flower shop can make a great addition to any playroom!
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