Pizza is a fun theme to do in preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten. Kids LOVE pizza! Research tells us that kids learn and retain the most when they are interested and invested in what they are learning about. The group I have this year would order pizza every day for lunch if their parents let them/ I knew pizza was a perfect theme for this group.
My pizza theme lasted about one month in my preschool classroom, and we also did a shapes unit during the pizza theme as well. Shapes was the perfect math unit to teach during our pizza theme. There are shapes all over a pizza restaurant found in toppings, slices, boxes, cups, sign, pans, etc.
You will find literacy, math, fine motor, art, blocks, sensory, and dramatic play center ideas below! When I teach a theme in my classroom, I integrate it into each and every center in my classroom!
Environmental print is the first thing students can “read” and the benefits of incorporating it are enormous for our little learners. I went to Google images and searched for pizza restaurant logos in our area that students would recognize. I copied them into a PowerPoint document, hit print, cut each one out, and taped them to a unit block.
It was a fun and meaningful way to integrate literacy into my block center. Students were building pizza restaurants, reading the environmental print, and some even made their own signs!
Pizza letter match puzzles built students knowledge about uppercase and lowercase letters. We also hid the puzzles in a sensory tub with beans. Students had to find the puzzle pieces then match the letters. Sorry, I forgot to take a picture of it.
My pre-k students were working on beginning sounds. I made this silly pizza initial sound game for students to practice isolating the beginning sound and identifying it.
Build a sight word is a favorite game in my classroom. Students pick a sight word and build it with the pizza letters. For my three-year-old students, we used our class name cards and built our friends’ names with the pizza letters.
Pizza-themed writing paper and vocabulary cards were added to the writing center! I LOVE open-ended activities so students can create something with our resources that is important to them. Students drew random pictures on the paper, copied the pizza words, drew pictures of the pizza vocabulary words, wrote letters to their friends and family, and just cut them apart into a million pieces.
Writing recipes is always an fun writing activity with my little preschoolers. From my Pizza Centers pack, I copied and cut out all the pictures of things they could use in their recipes. I showed an example of what a recipe was and then they could make their original pizza recipes.
It is interesting to see what they think the steps are to make a pizza. As you can see in the picture, I have students at varied levels working together on the same activity. Some students are mock writing and some are writing just the initial sound to represent the whole word.
During the second week of the theme, we read the The Little Red Hen FOUR times for different purposes. Reading books multiple times builds fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, concepts of print, and much more. I added the character cards, setting card, and event cards to my library center so students could retell the book with their peers. Watching students retell a book is one of my favorite things! You can find all of these things in my Little Red Hen pack.
Pizza and playdoh? Yes, please! I created these pizza build the number ten frames for students to practice counting and identifying numbers. I have one friend in my class who is not a fan of playdoh so he did the same activity using counters instead. My pre-k students had mats with two ten frames and my three-year-olds had a mat with a single ten frame.
Pizza Shapes is a fun game students can play to learn their shapes and talk about the attributes of shapes. The students who knew the name the shape had to also describe the shape before they covered it on the pizza. For extra fun, we used bingo counters to cover the board and a magnet wand to clear it.
Pizza topping tally graph was one of their favorite games because they could spin the spinner. Each student had their own recording page to tally the results of the spins. They loved announcing the winner at the end of the game, and it was a great way to practice more and less!
These clear spinners are awesome! Just tape the spinner to the board and the game is ready to go!
In the art center, students created collage pizzas! This builds their fine motor skills. First, they traced a large circle stencil onto brown paper and cut it out for the crust. I made the large circle stencil out of cardboard for durability. Then they painted on the sauce (aka red paint). Next, they added the cheese! Students cut the 1-inch wide yellow strips to make their cheese. The last step was to make the toppings. Students could crumble up black tissue paper for sausage, cut pieces of green string for green peppers, and punch with a circle punch or cut red pieces of paper for pepperoni.
Do you see all the fine motor I squeezed into this art activity? To strengthen their fine motor, they were tracing, cutting, painting, squeezing a glue bottle, crumbling up paper, and squeezing paper punches. It’s fantastic when learning and practicing is this much fun!
Pizza cutter art! Students painted using pizza cutters instead of paint brushes. These pizza cutters are for playdoh, and they worked perfectly. You can grab the colored trays on Amazon here.
For our pizza theme, I put flour in the sensory table. It was messy but totally worth it! Students could measure with measuring cups and measuring spoons, spread and mix the flour with spatulas, and make a flour pizza on the pizza pan. You can’t see from the picture but there is oregano in the flour to make it smell like real pizza.
Each week I added a new tool to the table to keep students excited and interested. Other tools I added were a mixing bowl, a sifter, and empty containers of various sizes. If you can’t have flour in your sensory table, try playdoh with no food coloring added or real pizza dough.
I don’t know about you but I LOVE using paper plates for art so I don’t have to cut out a million circles. Students drew their pizzas using markers. This was a super simple activity and the vocabulary students built talking to one another about their pizzas was amazing!
Take the pizza theme into your dramatic play center too by changing it into a Pizza Restaurant. The waitress can take the order, the chef makes the pizza, and the customer eats it. Don’t you just love the deliver truck?! Check out our Pizza Resturant HERE.
Make a pizza oven by covering a box with foil! You can grab pizza pans at the Dollar Tree. This year I used paper to create the crust and sauce. In the past, we used playdoh, and I have seen my other teacher friends use felt too.
Pizza books can be tricky to find so I created this HUGE list of my favorite Pizza Themed books for circle time! Check out the list Pizza Books for Little Learners .
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Want all the Pizza themed printables you see here and MORE? Grab my Pizza Math and Literacy Centers from my store. You can just print all your math and literacy centers and go!
Need Pizza Restaurant printables? Grab all my tips tricks, classroom photographs, props, signs, labels, orders, menus, parent letter, and more go check out my Pizza Restaurant Dramatic Play from my store by clicking HERE.
The Little Red Hen pack include a five day lesson plan, the retelling cards pictured, and writing/journal paper.
