When your little ones need to help their beloved plush pets with urgent pretend medical care, trust that Melissa & Doug will be on call to assist!
Pretend play gives kids the opportunity to immerse themselves in the story and be a part of the action, while expressing themselves creatively and expanding their imaginations. If you’re a parent or caregiver with a kiddo who loves pretend play, our latest Toy Spotlight blog is just what the (pet) doctor ordered.
With National Pet Day hitting calendars on Thursday, April 11, it’s the perfect opportunity for us to shine the Toy Spotlight on our beloved best-selling Examine & Treat Pet Vet Play Set, an excellent pretend play toy for kids who enjoy pretend play or have an interest in animals.
Read on STAT to learn why you’ll want to adopt our Examine & Treat Pet Vet Play Set ASAP for your budding pretend vets.
Why Kids Will Love this Pretend Play Veterinarian Play Set
Examine & Treat Pet Vet Play Set
Play Basics: This 24-piece pretend play pet vet set with plush dog and cat and fun veterinarian role playing accessories includes stethoscope, thermometer, syringe, ear scope, tweezers, clamp, cast, bandages, “treatments,” “ointments,” and reusable double-sided checklist for office visits.
Playful Details: Give young animal lovers everything they need to examine and treat pretend pets! The 24-piece collection for aspiring veterinarians 3 and older comes with two adorable plush pets (a dog and a cat), and accessories galore, including a stethoscope, thermometer, syringe, ear scope, tweezers, and clamp. There are bottles, tubes, and tubs of pretend treatments and ointments, bandages and a cast for boo-boos, and even a neck "cone" to keep pets from licking! Everything, including a reusable examination checklist, stores in a handy tote bag, so little vets can make house calls!
Age: 3+ years
Parents Will Love This Feature: This toy was recognized by toy experts at the Good Housekeeping Institute for how it helps kids develop empathy.
Who Will Love This: Any kid who loves exploring nature, enjoys visiting the zoo, or is interested in learning more about animals. If your child already displays signs of an empathetic nature, or you want to promote developing empathy as part of a kid’s important social-emotional growth, the Examine & Treat Pet Vet Play Set would make an ideal developmental toy. Plus, unstructured, imaginative, open-ended pretend play allows kids to discover their own interests, and gives them the time and space to explore those interests in their own way, at their own pace.
Skills at Play: Imagination, storytelling, creative expression, fine motor, social-emotional, empathy
Pretend play has been shown to offer a number of developmental benefits for kids: It helps improve imagination, narrative, and storytelling abilities; expand their view of the world, and how they interact with it; process feelings and emotions; and serves as practice for real-world scenarios that they’ll face as grow up and head to school. The Examine & Treat Pet Vet Play Set will spark kids’ imaginations, promote open-ended, kid-powered narrative play, and help promote empathy and social-emotional development.
Get the Play Started: Encourage your kids to practice pretend pet medicine using some creative prompts such as:
- Come up with a story: The dog got sick eating too much ice cream, the cat got hurt chasing a mouse, the regular vet is on vacation, and you need a house call stat!
- Scrub in and assist your kids during a routine check-up, and come up with wacky distractions to have even more fun.
- Incorporate other, more exotic plush stuffed animals into the pretend play fun: Help a giraffe with a sore throat, a penguin with a sprained flipper, a shark with a loose tooth, and more!
Plays Well With: Mix & match with other Melissa & Doug pretend play toys:
Giraffe Lifelike Plush Stuffed Animal
Your little vets will need more exotic animals to challenge their medical skills—consider letting them examine and treat our best-selling Giraffe Lifelike Plush Stuffed Animal for a colorful pretend adventure.
Although designed for human play, our Get Well Activity Center can also pull double duty for pretend animal patients if your little vets need a play space to ply their pretend medical practice.
It’s hard work keeping a medical office operating at peak efficiency—your team needs to be well organized to handle all those animal cases! Keep track of the pretend practice with My Magnetic Daily Calendar to help the kid vets keep their operations in order.
Help your little vets look the part of a pretend medical professional with our Doctor Role Play Costume Set—the scrubs will also protect your kiddo’s actual outfits from pretend messes!
Work & Play Desktop Activity Board
Pretend medical technology has come a long way since the days of clipboards and pencil stubs—to manage all the priorities of a bustling veterinarian practice, your vets need the latest pretend tech upgrades, such as our Work & Play Desktop Activity Board, which makes rounds at the vet’s office a breeze.
Quotable: “Absolutely Wonderful! My 3-year-old niece loves this, and announced she is going to be a vet after playing with it for a week straight. She lines up all her stuffed animals and gives them check ups. This is a great play set!”
—Happy Aunt, in a review posted to MelissaAndDoug.com
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