Let's Pretend: Grocery Store Dramatic Play

Create a Grocery Store Dramatic Play center for your toddler!

I am a blog ambassador for Lakeshore and am compensated for my work. I received products free of charge, but all thoughts and opinions are 100% mine.

What’s better than watching a toddler deeply engaged in imaginative play? Two toddlers engaged in imaginative play, of course! My kids are just entering the imaginative play phase and it’s fantastic to watch. To help their growing interest, I set them up their own grocery store dramatic play and it’s pretty awesome.

We love going to the market so creating a grocery store dramatic play center for my toddlers seemed like a fitting imaginative adventure. With just a few props, I was able to create a perfect grocery store.

Setting up a grocery store dramatic play was so easy!

Materials:

Three items from Lakeshore created the base for our grocery store: a simple cash register (with working credit card!), a large set of plastic food, and a kid-sized shopping basket. I LOVE that the food can be stored in the shopping basket and I double love how much life span there is in all these toys. My kids will be using these props for years and years to come.

I took a cereal box and wrapped it in foil to create a homemade bar code scanner. At the actual grocery store, that’s an item my son is fascinated with! Of course, we picked up a few paper bags from the store to bag our “groceries” in. I cut the tops off to make the bags a little more “toddler friendly” in size. It worked – my kids carry their groceries all over now.

Once I set up this grocery store dramatic play center, I backed off and let my kids and their imaginations take over. They collected the food in their basket, scanned it, then entered the money amount into the cash register. It seemed a little steep to charge $483 for a slice of pizza, but hey, it’s their pretend grocery store (wink). Finally, they’d load up the brown bag with the “purchased” food.

I loved everything about this simple dramatic play set up. I especially love that the cash register is simple enough to operate that even the 17 month old can fully use it.

Items like this are why we love Lakeshore: their toys are well tested, thoughtfully designed, teacher created and kids just adore them. I know this first hand as a former teacher and now mom of two. These are quality toys, plain and simple.

Setting up this grocery store dramatic play was such a snap and my kids have enjoyed it for days now (weeks actually). It’s definitely a staple center in our house – it’s so easy to set up and the kids play for what feels like hours with it.

Lakeshore has graciously offered the Busy Toddler community a 20% off coupon code for any one single, nonsale item. Click here to redeem that coupon! To learn more about Lakeshore, find them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.