Pretend Play: My Grocery – Digital Promise

Pretend Play: My Grocery

Pretend Play: My Grocery

Summary

Children will set up a grocery store to practice sorting and labeling their food items into groups and subgroups. As they sort and label their groups and subgroups, discuss how this involves abstraction, which focuses on some details while ignoring others. The benefit of this sorting structure and labeling can help them more easily find the food they need.

Activity Steps

1.

Optional: If children are unfamiliar with the grocery store, read Max Explains Everything: Grocery Store Expert by Stacey McNulty or another book about the grocery store (before children set up their own classroom grocery store). 

2.

Explain and describe abstraction.

  • Abstraction involves ignoring irrelevant details and focusing only on key information.
3.

To introduce the sorting activity for setting up the classroom grocery store, ask children what they know about sorting food into groups and subgroups, scaffolding as needed. Invite them to share what they know about grocery stores and how they are organized.

  • We’ve been practicing sorting our food into groups. Sorting involves grouping objects that are similar in some way. When we sort, we focus on specific details and ignore others. In what ways have you sorted food into groups? And subgroups?
  • How do you know where to look for your favorite fruit? Favorite vegetable? How should we set up our grocery store to make things easy to find? Let’s get ready to open our own store!
4.

Encourage children to work together to identify the food items and their characteristics. Prompt them to describe similarities and differences as they sort into groups.

  • What is the same or similar about the ____ in this group? And this group?
5.

Have them also create labels for each group reminding them that labels can help describe what is in each group because they show only the important details.

  • Remember you can label your groups so that I can easily find the food I need when I come by your store later on. The labels don’t need to include everything that is there. We just need to include the important details that will help our customers/visitors find what they need in our store.
6.

Invite children to think about how they can organize groups into subgroups. For example, if the fruit is in one basket, ask them if and how they could sort the fruit into multiple subgroups (e.g., apples vs pears, red fruit vs green fruit).

  • I see a group that is labeled ____ . If I need ____ how can this group be sorted into two smaller groups to make it even easier to find?

CONTEXT: Learning Centers

LENGTH: 10 minutes

MATERIALS:

  • Pretend food items
  • Baskets or bins
  • Labels
  • Markers or crayons
  • Optional: Max Explains Everything: Grocery Store Expert by Stacey McNulty (or another book about the grocery store)

In this activity, children will engage in:

Computational Thinking

  • Organize and label objects by identifying important information while ignoring irrelevant details or details that are not necessary to the goal of the activity

Science

  • Observe, describe, and sort food into groups
Sign Up For Updates! Email icon

Sign up for updates!

×