Kindergarten Preschool
Dramatic PlayMathPrintablesLanguage ArtsWinter
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If your kids are anything like mine, they love nothing more on a cold winter day than a steaming cup of hot chocolate. Especially now, as the holiday season approaches.
I can’t even begin to count the number of times they have helped me make cocoa after coming in from playing outside and each and every time, their eyes light up as they mix it all together and add their marshmallows.
With this hot chocolate stand dramatic play center, they can now pretend to make cups of cocoa to their heart’s content and they don’t even realize they’re learning while they’re doing it!
From a full-color menu of items to printable to go cup sleeves, this dramatic play center has everything you need to build your very own hot chocolate stand in your home or classroom!
Hot Chocolate Stand Dramatic Play Center
Now, along with these pretend play printables, you’ll want to add a few fun props to the mix to really create hours of fun for your little ones.
Hot Chocolate Stand Supplies
Obviously, you can use anything you have lying around to build your own cocoa stand, but if you’re looking for a few ideas, the list below contains all of the different items that we used in ours.
- Plastic (or non-breakable) coffee mugs
- Paper to go cups
- Cotton balls or white pom poms for marshmallows and whipped cream
- Brown construction paper
- Small cookie sheets
- Plastic coffee pot
- A few small bowls or baskets
- A hole punch
- Large plastic tweezers
- A small pitcher or container
- Craft sticks (or candy canes if you’d like something a little more festive)
- Toy cash register
You’ll also need a few sheets of colored construction paper, some twine or ribbon, and a pair of scissors to get everything ready for play.
Setting Up Your Hot Chocolate Stand
With a few basic supplies and a little imagination, you’d be surprised at what you can add to this winter-themed center!
For our hot chocolate stand, we grabbed a couple of handfuls of cotton balls and with the first half, we left them as they were and used those as marshmallows because you can’t have hot chocolate without a few marshmallows!
The rest of the cotton balls became our whipped cream after we gently pulled and stretched them a bit. The kiddos really loved how much they looked like a cloud of whipped cream.
To make the chocolate sprinkles, we simply took a sheet of brown construction paper and cut it into small rectangular pieces. If you’re looking to avoid a bit of the mess, you can easily skip this ingredient or substitute brown yarn for the paper and pretend that it is chocolate syrup that you’ve drizzled over the top of your cocoa.
Finally, we grabbed a couple of cookie sheets and added our printable fresh from the bakery treats. We simply laminated ours and laid them on the trays, but if you’re wanting to add a little more fine motor play, you could easily add a bit of Velcro to the back of your treats and to your cookie sheets.
Ready to build your own hot cocoa stand?
The printable set includes:
- A generic hot chocolate stand sign
- Open/Closed signs
- A menu cover
- Full-color menu
- Black and white menu with cover
- Punch cards
- Supply (prop) labels (mugs, marshmallows, etc.)
- Cocoa pennant banner
- To go cup sleeves
- Cookies (Christmas and regular)
- Doughnuts
- Job role tags
- Order forms that match the menu (in both color and black and white)
- Blank labels for extra supplies or job roles
- List of suggested props
Grab the entire set either in our shop or from our TpT store. It makes such a fun dramatic play center and can be used all winter long!
