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Chinese Restaurant Dramatic Play Center

Do you ever find it difficult to know how to incorporate culture and social studies into a preschool classroom? The challenge of making culture, geography and social studies meaningful and relevant to 3, 4 and 5 year olds can be tricky!

Chinese New Year is a great time to incorporate culture in the classroom. Students can enjoy a Chinese Restaurant to help them connect with traditions of Lunar New Year. Our favorite culture lessons come from holidays such as Christmas (we do “Christmas Around the World” activities) and Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year gives me the chance to help my students connect with the language we are learning – Chinese. We do culture and geography activities all month long during the month of the Chinese New Year celebrations.

Ideas for Setting up the Play Restaurant:

1.Use a kitchen set for the “chefs” in the restaurant.

There are many diverse and beautiful play kitchen sets, or you can create your own using crates or shelves! I got mine for free from a neighbor. A play kitchen is a worthy investment for pretend play as it can be used in so many different imaginative set ups.

2. Have a space for a cash register, phone, keyboard, etc.

I love incorporating these elements because they not only encourage math and literacy, they also encourage social interactions between the students. They pretend to place orders over the phone or in person, they exchange payment, write down orders, and “serve” food to one another.

3. Add a cookbook, menus, and other environmental print.

See if your area has any Asian Markets: they often have authentic food to try as well as utensils, newspaper, and other print media to add to your pretend play. Bilingual menus, posters, and labels are also available in my Chinese Restaurant Set.

4. Add unique food props such as noodles, rice, sushi, spring rolls, dumplings, steamed buns, etc.

These foods are harder to find because they are unique, but they provide the opportunity to add cultural vocabulary to student play.

You can make some of the food on your own using string (noodles), rolled up felt (spring rolls) small white pom poms (rice) etc. You can also check out adorable felt foods from etsy, or plastic play food sets like this one from China. (I own it, it was very inexpensive, but worked great to add elements of Chinese food!)

5. Encourage Students to Write

Laminate signs for “daily special” and “hours of operation” so students can frequently write and erase with dry-erase markers.
Print plenty of “order forms” for students to circle or write down orders. Simply attach forms to a clipboard and add a pencil tied to a string, so it stays in place. (You can find my printables here)

6. Add Authentic Chinese Decor

Again, a local Asian market will likely have some things to use, but I found many authentic items from amazon. The picture shows the set I bought. I also bought a gong, strand lights and chopsticks.