Using Your Vet Clinic Pretend Play Center for Social-Emotional Learning

Hi! Today I wanted to share how you can use your Vet Clinic Dramatic Play Center to build your students’ social emotional learning. If you’re a classroom teacher, or a grown up trying to set up purposeful play at home, there are simple things we can add to play set ups to build our students’ understanding of important social emotional skills.

If you’re curious how I set up my Vet Clinic, be sure to check out this blog post. All of the resources pictured in this post are from my Vet Clinic Dramatic Play Center.

Label Emotions and Feelings

One of the most important building blocks of social emotional learning is being able to identify emotions. During pretend play, we can help our students identify the animal’s emotions as well as their owners. I’ve created a few “feeling” charts to help students remember and label emotions.

We can ask questions like:

• How do you think they are feeling right now?
• How do you know?
• What does someone’s body look like when they feel ______?
• If an animal is hiding, what do you think that means?
• Have you ever been to the doctor? How did you feel?

Make Connections

The best way to help students understand others emotions is to help them connect to their own. In a vet clinic, we can ask them to remember a time they went to the doctor. Many young children feel afraid or nervous when they have to go to the doctor. Remembering their own experiences will help them infer how their “patients” and their owners are feeling.

Practice and Model Empathy

I provided these charts in my Vet Clinic Dramatic Play Resource as a way to support students when they “pretend.” When they practice showing compassion and comforting another during play, they will be more comfortable doing this in real life. We can remind our students or children that these are things we can do all the time…not just when we are pretending to be a vet!

Send “Get Well” Cards

Connecting with our loved ones when they are hurt or sick is such a valuable skill. By providing opportunities to practice during play, we support them doing this in real life. The goal of these “get well cards” was to model a simple way to be kind when someone you care about is sick! The more opportunities we give them to show compassion and empathy, the more comfortable they will be with those skills!

I love that this dramatic play set up offers so many ways to build empathy and compassion in our students! It’s the perfect way to practice being kind, supportive, and work on other important play skills like imagination, creativity, problem solving, and more!