Homemade Doctor Kit and Coat

My kids love to play make believe, and so I decided to give them a play doctor kit for Christmas. However, as I searched around, I found that many of the doctor kits were really small and cheap, and the highly rated sets were quite expensive for what they offered. So, I was inspired by this post to make my own kit. For the main part of the kit, I used a black carrying case that used to hold my husband's hair clippers. I then went to the dollar store and found a lot of treasures--an ace bandage, an ankle brace, face masks, a small flashlight, and an ice pack. Most of the rest of the items I used were items I already had around the house--extra medicine droppers, an old thermometer, empty medicine bottles from which I removed the labels and then filled with sparkly pom-poms... I then made a few things to add to the kit. I found a picture of a band-aid and copied a whole page of that picture onto mailing labels using my word processing software. I then printed a page of these "band-aid" stickers. I printed and laminated the x-ray cards from the blog Chasing Marcus, though it doesn't look like those printables are available to the public anymore. A simple google image search should yield plenty of images of x-rays that you could print, or you could purchase x-rays like Amazing X-rays: The Human Body online. I also printed out and laminated an eye chart. Several different choices of eye charts can be found here. To finish my kit, I did spring for one real "doctor item" online--a stethoscope. I purchased a real stethoscope from Amazon.com.

It was surprisingly inexpensive for the quality. My kids love playing with it, listening to heartbeats and breathing. And I have even pulled it out for my own real-life use to listen to my children's breathing on nights when they are sick with croup or bad colds.

In addition, I re-purposed an old white shirt to make a lab coat. I hemmed it a bit and then took a sharpie and  printed a name on the pocket.

We have been having a lot of fun playing make believe "doctor" with this costume and kit. For more fun doctor-related play, see also our "x is for x-ray" pre-school unit.

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