Bakery Themed Dramatic Role Play

Dramatic role play or “jeu de rôle” is a great way to encourage your kids speaking in French in a dedicated play space by using themed content vocabulary in a playful manner.

A “jeu de rôle” is a technique or activity whereby our French little learners get to impersonate a character (real or imaginary) in an imaginative environment set up for play purposes.

Imaginative “jeu de rôle” plays an important part of early childhood development as it helps develop their oral language skills, early reading skills, early writing skills, cooperation and social skills in a dedicated dramatic play space in French!

In this blog post, I would like to share the bakery play space I set up for my son.

I have very fond childhood memories of going to the bakery after school to buy a baguette. I would often eat the “crouton” of the baguette on the way back home.

I mean, you can probably relate. However, we do not have any good French bakery we could go to every day like we would in France.

So I thought to myself, why not bring the bakery to us, and use this opportunity to learn new French vocabulary and learn what a baker does in his bakery?

To achieve this, I decided to create a range of bakery themed printables and use them to set up an inviting bakery for my son to play in at home!

We have limited space at home and I didn’t want to buy more pieces of furniture so I tried to re-use what we already had at home:

For the cash registry area, I simply repurposed our play table with our play cash registry and used the posters, signs and labels to decorate and create an inviting space for our customers to order from and pay.

For the kitchen area, I used a small table with some large baking mats placed on top and placed some baking accessories on it (bowl, scale, rolling pin, mixer) along with our recipe book and recipes printables.

I place our wooden kitchen next to it with some plates, labels and posters from my bakery pack.

Finally, I repurposed our shelving system to display some utensils, ingredients, play food, apron, job tags, etc and used some more posters and bunting to give the space a bakery look.

You could also add some information books or any craft activity about the bakery in your play space to decorate it further. You might even like to encourage your pre-schoolers to help create additional items for your bakery depending on their age!

For example, I used air dry clay to make bread and croissant props. I also used some coloured modelling clay to make macarons.

The whole play space looked so cute and inviting. My son was immersed straight away into the space, and engaged in purposeful imaginary role play in French!

There is a lot included in my play pack. Depending on how you want to set up your bakery, you may want to use all of the printables provided or you may select just a few. You might even like to encourage your pre-schoolers to help create additional items for your bakery depending on their age!

As your kids play and imagine in a dedicated French-inspired environment, they will be building fantastic content-specific vocabulary in French!

If you would like to grab this play pack and set your play area, you can find the full bakery pack below:

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