Keeping with the children's interest in the home corner, imaginary play and the letter of the week theme, I began to look for some environment ideas during my full control week. After perusing Pinterest, I came up with the idea of creating a felt board pizza!
After a trip to my local Spotlight, a large chain craft store, where I purchased an A4 multi-coloured felt set, an A3 piece of stiff brown felt, I returned home and looked at what exactly goes into a pizza.
I found this pin, which also has some great ideas for other felt board designs, and decided to include the following toppings:
- cheese
- ham
- pepperoni
- mushroom
- capsicum
- chicken
- olives
It was painstakingly difficult to cut out some of the shapes on the felt and because I traced the shapes on the felt with permanent marker you can see the outline where my cutting was a little off but the end result was pretty good...
I thought the pizza box would add a nice touch so imagine the face of our local pizza hut guy when I asked if I could have a clean empty box alongside my thin and crispy super supreme! I added picture and word labels to the toppings box and besides the large mirror sign and sectioned container of toppings, I also added a small notepad and pen so the children could 'take orders'. During their play, one child suggested we add in a phone so people could call and tell us while another suggested we get a car so we could deliver!
From the pictures and observations, it looks like they had a lot of fun...
This set up encouraged the children to talk about what they wanted to have on their pizza, to consider others as they completed order and encouraged them to use letters and words to symbolise any orders on the note pad. They became very adept at sectioning and sorting the ingredients during pack up time and were quick to tell each other how to take care of their new toy.
It was so cheap and easy to make, minor my small embarrassment at Pizza Hut, and the quality of play that occurred as a result was amazing!
Felt and felt boards is definitely something I want to further play around with and experiment with in the future so stay tuned for any new developments!
Miss Tracy xx
