This month, we have a Post Office in our dramatic play center. February is a good month for this because the children “deliver mail” on Valentine’s Day, so it ties in well. Look for more of my Dramatic Play centers here — I’ve been sharing one each month this year. At the bottom of this post, I will share where I got each item.
This is the front of our Post Office. The awning is made of bulletin board paper; in fact, I just used the same awning I made for the Bakery. I added a Post Office sign and an office hours sign (from Pre-K Pages).
The top shelf has a big blue mailbox with a mail slot, which is from Lakeshore, and mail sorting bins. The second shelf has shipping boxes. The bottom shelf has stamps, labels, and glue sticks. The blue mailbox just happened to be in my classroom before I started working at my school, so if you don’t want to purchase one, I shared one that my class made at a previous school here: Post Office Teachers.net Article.
These blue bins are for sorting mail. The bins came from the Dollar Tree and I printed the logo from online. Children can sort mail in different ways: letters and magazines, or large and small mail, or incoming and outgoing mail. Ask them to think of ways they could sort the mail.
The middle shelf has shipping boxes of different sizes: small, medium, and large. I saved used priority mail boxes and other cardboard shipping boxes for this.
These are our stamps in the bowl on the left and labels in the bowl on the right. I have all of the labels in one bowl together rather than sorted, because last year the kids mixed them up anyway. These are photocopied on paper and children use glue stick to stick them on envelopes or packages.
This is our Post Office’s Open/Closed sign. The children just flip it over when center time ends.
This is the back side of our dramatic play center, which shows a price list and a mailbag. For the mailbag, I bought the blue bag at Hobby Lobby and attached a post office logo. Right now, I have it printed on card stock paper and taped really well with some strong duct tape, but for a more permanent solution, I will probably make an iron on, or just paint the word “MAIL” with fabric paint.
Every dramatic play post office needs envelopes. Since I keep envelopes in our Writing Center all year, I decided to continue to keep them there, so it wouldn’t confuse the kids. I collect junk mail envelopes from my family as well as children’s parents, and usually end up with more than I need. The kids love them!
This is our postal scale for weighing mail (a very old, old one I had at home) and a rubber stamp for canceling postage stamps. The “canceling stamp” is also a really old stamp I found. It has a “K” on it, but the kids don’t really care what it looks like. They have fun pretending, so round up whatever you can find.
Where it Came From:
I used several printable items from the Post Office Dramatic Play Pack which is sold at Vanessa’s site, Pre-K Pages.
- post office sign
- hours sign
- price list
- stamps (to photocopy)
- labels (to photocopy)
- open/closed sign
- small, medium, large box labels (seen on the shelf)
The mailbox came from Lakeshore Learning.
The market shelf with awning is the “Village Store” from Community Playthings. This shelf is the toddler size shelf, so the shelf is not tall. We use it just to display our store items, the kids don’t actually stand there the whole time. It works well for our class.
Disclosure: I was not paid or compensated in any way to promote any of the above products listed on this page. The links are provided simply to be helpful.
Books About Mail and the Post Office for Kids
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