From Stormie:

For all the pretend "hibernating bear" children in your classroom, paint a large appliance-sized box to represent a cave.  Place it in your Play Kitchen area for the month or wherever your dramatic play area is located.  Children can pretend to be bears (perhaps two at a time) crawling in and out of it, or it could serve as your "Quiet Corner."  

Better yet, at the beginning of the month, have the children paint and create the box-cave themselves if your lesson plans allow time for it.  First, discuss hibernation, winter weather, and related topics.  You could provide real tree branches for them to glue or lay atop the cave, etc.  Perhaps a brown blanket could be the ground inside the cave.  And so on.  Allow them to decide on the details based on what they're learning about hibernating animals!  They may decide to be something other than a bear.

Or perhaps you would like to turn your drama corner into something else entirely for the month?  For example, if one of your themes is "Community Helpers," you have lots of options (hospital for doctor/nurse, restaurant for chef, etc).

From Kimerly Gaines:
To add "Winter" to our January creative drama area, we add empty frozen food boxes to the Play Kitchen, and I draw a backdrop mural from a scene in "the Mitten" book.

Share your thoughts and ideas too.  E-mail me at stormie@preschoolbystormie.com

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Reminder from Stormie: If you would like to begin collecting ALL my current classroom ideas (each on a 4 x 6" index card), as well as new ones that I create, you can do so by ordering my "Activity Cards."  Click here to check them out.

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