I am putting together my little girl’s birthday present. She is turning four, and I am making her a puppet theater. I am combining her love for role playing with her love to play doctor, but I want to give her something more meaty as far as the doctor role playing goes.
I kind of want to create a little game where the characters wear name tags listing there symptoms and we have to figure out what’s wrong and how to “fix” them. I feel kind of out of my league on this one and wanted some expertise or point in the right direction.
Thanks.
How about a lab coat, and a real (can be bought cheaply) stethoscope? Maybe some scrubs too?
Maybe try to get some old xray film or even real xrays (they need to be thrown out at some point but doctors do have to keep them for years), lab coats, you can buy small plastic toys that have a check list of things to be checked by a doctor (really basic stuff - you could always get a clipboard and add pieces of paper with a check list for symptoms or things that need checking - blood pressure, temperature, habitus, sleep, appetite, vomition? etc), a toy or real stethoscope, bottles for pills (preferably non openable for safety - DO NOT put sweets in containers ever and pretend they are medicine), a toy syringe or even a few real syringes - you can play with them with different coloured water and just squirt things or with air to pretend to inject things, a hammer (not sure what it is called but is used for the knee jerk reflex) - you can get toy ones of these, bandages - real or pretend, plasters, you could always make toy ultrasound machines/xray machines/CT and MRI scanners out of boxes for diagnoses and plastic tubing for scopes (for pretend use only - don’t let them eat this), pretend surgical instruments (must be blunt!), tongue depressors, a real thermometer that is safe (digital is best).
Then you could also have a sheet for patient monitoring and a discharge sheet with instructions and repeat appointments and perhaps a small present for the patient just for fun.
Thats about all I can think of for now.
What a great idea! 
How about these?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000GL1BVA
Kids toy X-ray and the game can be her teaching the patients the name of the bones.
Forgot to add… It may be worthwhile to ask her what kind of doctor she wants to be, i.e. her specialty?
One day she can be an orthopedic surgeon and the puppet patient can be called “Patella Patty” and your daughter could say “see here, Ms.Patty, your patella is broken and that’s why your knee hurts,” while holding up the x-ray. Then she could see Femur Fred, Tibia Tina, Mandible Manny, etc…
Every time she plays it could be a new specialty and she could remember the name of the specialty which would just add to vocabulary (lots of medical terms have Latin and Greek root words in them which may be useful in the future.
Here are some more tools that may be useful:
There’s also plastic models of organs that are cheap (a plastic brain, an eye, etc…)but you could probably wait for that till she gets a bit older, ditto for books on diseases (I used to love reading those as a kid).
Good luck!
Oh, wow!
I was just placing an order at Lakeshore and came across this Deluxe Doctor’s Office Kit! It is mostly done for you, everything from a stethoscope to an eye chart:)
http://www.lakeshorelearning.com/product/productDet.jsp?productItemID=1%2C689%2C949%2C371%2C912%2C797&ASSORTMENT<>ast_id=1408474395181113&bmUID=137366753980
If nothing else, you could use the set for ideas…
Those are great ideas. Thanks! I am sewing together the puppet theater that is just going to hang in the doorway on a spring rod. I am so excited for the cute Melissa/Doug Doctor puppet. I think she is going to have lots of fun with all the puppets. I love the ideas. I am going to work on some tags to hang around the puppets neck with key medical terms about the puppet’s “illness.” I also found some great free doctor printables…even XRAY printables.
http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/topic/roleplay/emergency/medical.html#.UeN_pm2AF5c
So much to do…I can’t believe she is going to be four.