Doctor 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 doctor clinic play space that I set up for my son.

Let’s face it, what a year 2020 has been! My son has been asking a lot of health-care-related questions: why do we have to wear a face mask? Why do we have to wash our hands? How do we get sick? How do we get better? What do we do if we get sick? What does a doctor check? And the list goes on!

With the challenging times, we have been mostly doing telehealth this year; so, my son didn’t get to go to a doctor clinic this year.

Then I thought to myself, why not bring the doctor clinic to us, and use this opportunity to learn new French vocabulary and learn how a doctor operates a clinic to help heal his patients?

To achieve this, I decided to create a range of doctor themed printables and use them to set up an inviting doctor clinic 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 reception area, I simply placed 2 chairs next to each other’s and used the posters, signs and labels to decorate and create an inviting space.

For the doctor clinic, I used our cube shelving to set up the doctor tools, accessories, forms, etc.

I placed medicine labels on recycled bottles and placed a baby change mat on top of my son’s craft table to create the doctor consult room.

I used labels, signs, bunting and forms to give the space a doctor clinic vibe. You could also add some cotton buds, cotton balls, cotton pads in clear plastic containers.

Finally, I used our DYI light table to create a radiography space. I didn’t like the look of the X-Ray photos when printed out on real paper and used on the light table, so I recycled some real X-Rays to use on our light table.

You might have kept some pregnancy X-Rays or injury X-Rays which would look fabulous and so real for your little learners to use on the light table. My son loved trying to identify which part of the body he was looking at.

You could also add some information books or any craft activity about the body in your play space to decorate it further.

You might even like to encourage your pre-schoolers to help create additional items for your doctor practice depending on their age!

The whole play space looked so cute and inviting. My son was immersed straight away into 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 doctor clinic, 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 doctor practice 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 get it below:

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