How about a little pretend play using what you already have at home. The Children's Museum is always filled with fun activities that your little ones are screaming not to be torn from and wish that they had at home.
Let's get creative. We have an area where we created a grocery store. Just set up some extra shelves that we had sitting around. A coffee table or other tables will works just as well.
If you have a cash register that is great! If not maybe a pouch or apron with pockets. How about that old art smock. If you are creative you can sew an apron for little ones.
We raided the pantry and found boxes, containers and canisters to use. First we washed them out and let them thoroughly dry. Then we taped the boxes shut and used a hot glue gun to glue the lids on the containers and canisters.
Oatmeal boxes, peanut containers, old syrup bottles, pop bottles, empty milk jugs you get the idea!
We then placed them on our empty shelves in our pretend grocery store area. Used the plastic food we had from our play kitchen set and finally our store was stocked. We could not forget that our ladies or gents would need a place to store their play money and coupons so we used old purses and wallets that should have been donated a long time ago. We used some empty baskets as our shopping baskets.
We used brown paper bags that we save after our weekly shopping trips or gift bags from gifts.
We found great templates for pretend money at :
http://www.moneyinstructor.com/docs/pdf/bills_20.pdf
We also found great templates for coupons at:
http://couponing.about.com/od/groceryzone/ss/teach1_1grp_3.htm
