Foam food for dramatic play

Last week I posted my plans for our holiday cookie party at school.  I’ve been working on prepping some of the materials for our cookie shop dramatic play area , which means adding to my collection of foam cookies. I wanted to show you some of the cookies that I made before, and the new varieties that I made specifically for our party.

I made all of these with sheets of craft foam, and they couldn’t be easier.  Making your own food with craft food is a great alternative to buying play food because it s really easy to customize, and it’s all flat, so it stores better than most store bought play food.

These are chocolate chip cookies.  I just cut circles out of a light tan piece of craft foam and drew the chocolate chips on with a permanent marker.

These sugar cookies were a bit more involved (but still very easy).  First I cut circles out of tan foam (for sugar cookies) and out of dark brown foam (for chocolate cookies).  On each of the circles I put a square of sticky-back velcro.

Then I cut frosting shapes from colored foam (I used red and white for Christmas cookies), and drew sprinkles on these shapes with permanent markers.  I attached these to the other side of the stick back velcro.  since the frosting comes off of the cookie that kids can pretend to bake the cookies, and then pretend to frost them.

I made the chocolate chip cookies and the sugar cookies a couple of years ago and they are well loved (many of them have bite marks in them…).  For our holiday cookie party I wanted to make sure that we had all of the cookies to go along with the printables in Play to Learn Preschool’s dramatic play cookie shop set, so I made some gingerbread cookies.

For these I created a paper stencil and traced it on a sheet of dark brown craft foam.

I cut the gingerbread men out and glued sequins on for eyes, and white glitter on for frosting.  That’s it, how cute do they look on a cookie sheet?!

The last kind of cookie that I made are gingerbread lacing cookies. To make these I chose a couple of Christmas cookie cutter shapes. I pressed each shape into the sheet of foam, which left an impression so that I didn’t have to trace the cookie cutter (a nifty little tip!).

Then I cut out the shapes and punched holes around the edges.  Finally I added some pretty ribbon, they look like fun to me!

I can’t wait to share these with my students, I’m sure that they are going to love baking cookies that look this cute! I will post photos from our cookie party after Christmas so that you can see how we set it all up.