We love this game and children can learn such a lot from playing it.

Children collect the books off their book shelves and pretend to scan them to borrow them from the ‘library’. They can also practice renewing and returning books aswell as being a librarian.

What do you need? 

• Selection of books (they don’t have to all be children’s books either, the more diverse the selection the better!)

Optional extras:

• if you’ve got a ‘play supermarket til’ then this can work brilliantly as the book scanner– but I’m sure the more imaginative parents out there can fashion a book scanner out of card!

• Library card– we used a pretend debit card from a children’s magazine, but again this could be made quite easily!

• Library Phone-  perfect for ‘calling customers’ to remind them to renew their books. My kids loved ‘telling naughty customers off!!’

Skills learnt

In addition to the benefits of Imaginative Play children can:

• Learn categories and sorting be asking children to find a book on a certain topic, or to organise the ‘library’ by putting similar books together based on colour, size, topic, fiction/non fiction.

• Support learning of the alphabet and learning to read by organising books into alphabetical order.
• Promotes a love for books! We also found that there were  fantastic books on our shelves we hadn’t read for ages.

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