How can I 'dip my toes' into dynamic IPv6 network addressing?

I don't see why you can't do it substantially the same way with IPv6 as with IPv4 (though I will recommend deploying by subnets rather than by single hosts; it will save you a lot of time and headaches later).

This is how IPv6 works here (greatly simplified; see RFC 4861 for the gory details):

The default router sends a router advertisement periodically, or when it receives a router solicitation from a new host. The RA contains the address of the router, of course, and various flags. Of interest to us here are the M (managed) flag and the O (other) flag. These flags specify that the host should get the remainder of its configuration information from a DHCPv6 server:

• When the M flag is set, all configuration information (except the router addresses) is provided by DHCPv6.
• When the O flag is set, the host configures its own IPv6 address with SLAAC; all other configuration information (except the router addresses) is provided by DHCPv6.

At that point, it's just a matter of using, e.g. fixed-address6 in your dhcpd.conf configuration to set reservations; your DHCPv6 setup will be substantially similar to the DHCP setup for IPv4.

I've also skipped over the case where a subnet might have two or more routers handling the "default" route; in this case look into IPv6 router preference for configuring this aspect.

You can set up a DHCPv6 server (such as WIDE or ISC) for stateful configuration or radvd for stateless auto configuration. IPv6 specifies the range FC00::/7 for unique local addresses (similar to private address ranges in IPv4).