DIY: Easy Dramatic Play Cookbook

I have the easiest DIY ever for you today! I always struggle with making materials for the dramatic play area because I know how much wear and tear they are going to take, but this one is perfect,

I encourage teachers to add written materials to their dramatic play areas, and cookbooks are an easy fix for any kitchen or restaurant theme. You could find cookbooks at Goodwill or garage sales, but I really love cookbooks that have plenty of pictures too, and these can be harder to find.  So for this “cookbook” I just used the recipes from the backs of boxes!

There are a couple of ways that you can do this. You can collect boxes and cut all of the backs with the recipes off – which is ideal because the cardboard makes the cookbook “pages” more durable, but I didn’t want to cut the backs off of all the boxes in my pantry, so I did a Google image search for back of the box recipes and printed the images.  They came out really nice, you can’t tell they they are printed images if you don’t look that close.

After I printed the recipe pages I made a cute little cover for the cookbook. I’m sharing this with you – so download it here! I put the cover in the front of a three ring binder – these seem to hold up the best, and it is a good way to put the boxes together since they are all different sizes.

Once the cover was done I punched the recipes with a three-hole punch and put them in the binder.

How easy is that?! You could turn this into a really fun family engagement activity too, introduce the book to the children and then ask all of your families to add one recipe to your book. It would be fun to see what each child or family chose to bring in!