Zookeeper Dramatic Play: Introducing a Question and a Question Mark

Building a Question for the Zookeeper Preschool and K Dramatic Play

Dramatic play with a zoo keeper and animals are always exciting for preschoolers. Today we engineered a gate to the zoo and set up a funny zoo game to practice building questions and answers, as well as using a question mark and period.

This quick set up turned into ten minutes of building questions and handing tickets. The zoo animals were very excited about entering the zoo and learning to use a question mark!

Welcome to the Zoo

"Welcome to the Zoo!" by Alison Jay was the wonderful book that inspired us for this dramatic play. We made up some funny stories and questions using the simple and engaging illustrations from the book. There are no words in this book. The pictures are so cute and funny - the book is asking for telling stories with animal sounds, or playing games, or discussing the latest trip to the zoo.

Amazon affiliate link: Welcome to the Zoo!

Zoo Animals Dramatic Play Quick Set up

Zoo STEM connection: We started by finding the right supplies for engineering the zoo gate.

For this activity we used:
The Zoo gate,
toys at hand: a pretend zoo keeper and animals on a tray,
Lego Duplo blocks,
DIY cards "it, is, a, ?, ." taped on blocks,
small bits of paper for pretend tickets.

• Zookeeper: Who wants to come to my zoo?
• Giraffe: I do!
• Zookeeper: Great! My question is: (building sentences pictured above Is it a giraffe? It is a giraffe.)
• Giraffe: Yes, I am a giraffe!
• Zookeeper: Welcome to the zoo! Here is your ticket.

After Giraffe enters the zoo with his ticket, the game continues with the next animal of choice.

This simple scenario became very addicting! We couldn't stop playing until we ran out of "tickets". (We didn't run out of the animals because they continued finding excuses to go in and out of the zoo.)

Then the zoo dramatic play changed according to the flow of imagination: so fun!

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