Sand pit fairy garden for small world play

Our sand pit is often the site of the children’s small world creations and I keep it stocked with different materials they can use to build and make and play. We’ve been chatting about ‘loose parts’ recently over on NurtureStore’s facebook page and I know more and more of you are including them in your play settings, with some of you taking steps to clear out plastic toys and replace them with natural materials instead. By loose parts I mean offering children open-ended materials that they can use in their play, any way they like.

Loose parts we often have available  in our sand pit area include:

sand :: water :: sticks :: bark :: straw :: fir cones :: shells :: pebbles :: slate :: gravel :: pots and pans :: cups and plates :: wooden and metal spoons :: scoops :: slices of tree trunk ::

Another great addition to a loose parts collection is to have a Snipping Pot: a few extra tubs of plants that the children can pick and use in their play. A pot of ‘cut-and-come-again lettuce’ is a great choice as it quickly re-grows for the children to use another day. Herbs are also perfect, adding the extra sensory elements of sight, smell and taste.

Giving children ‘permission’ to pick some of the flowers in the garden and having interesting materials available can result in wonderful creative play. B’s fairy garden is a classic ‘loose parts’ creation and she chose a variety of plants to create a little orchard…

And a little allotment, planted with neat rows of vegetables.

Her fairy garden is super simple, made of only sand, plants and imagination, but also something full of her own ideas. It’s lovely to watch and see what children make when they have a blank canvass and a few supplies.

Do you offer loose parts in your garden?

What kind of materials do you include for your children to play with? What are their favourites?

 More garden play ideas

If your children love to play outdoors or you’d like to bring more of nature inside, come and take a peek at The Garden Classroom. It’s got a whole year’s worth of nature play ideas, including dinosaur small worlds and miniature garden ideas.

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We have a truly tiny garden, in a Victorian terraced house on the edge of a city in the UK. It has no lawn, is surrounded by a brick wall but we still manage to grow (are you ready for this…) apples, basil, bay, beetroot, borlotti beans, broad beans,  chives, cress, cucumber, courgette, fennel, garlic, green beans, lavender, leek,  lettuce, nasturtiums, onions, oregano, parsley,  peas, pears, peppers, potatoes, raspberries, radish, rocket, sage, spinach, spring onions, strawberries, sunflowers, thyme, tomatoes as well as a variety of pretty flowers and shrubs. We also have areas for play and space for the adults to sit and relax or eat outside.

Welcome to our garden, come and take a look around.

My new e-book  The Garden Classroom features 52 garden-based projects which have been tried, tested and approved in our garden. So I know for sure that there’s a lots of growing and playing you can fit in a very small space. Here are my 10 rules to maximise what you have to turn your small family garden into a great place to enjoy.

Rule 1: Plan

Draw up a wish list of everything you’d love to have in your garden, including ideas the children have. Then take a look at the space you have and see what’s possible. In a small family garden every centimetre counts, so set your priorities and organise them into your space. Every year I draw out a roughly-to-scale plan of our garden and work out what we will grow where – nothing fancy, just a basic template. This helps me be clever about doubling up our use of space – so for example the girls play-house will be the framework that our peas and beans grown up, the shed door is painted with blackboard paint to become a chalk board, the mini-greenhouse where we start all our veggies off houses the tomatoes once the veg has been planted out in the garden.

Rule 2: Be ambitious

Practise abundance! Don’t think small, think possibilities! Do you think it’s possible to grow 34 different types of food in the garden of a terraced house? Until I wrote this list I didn’t realise quite how much we do manage to fit in.  I want my children to have the experience of seeing how lots of things grow and trying lots of home-grown foods, so we focus on variety rather than quantity. We might only get two or three bowl’s full of strawberries but what a treat after you have waited for days for them to turn from green to red. We also always throw in a wild card each year, something we have never grown before, because it’s good to keep trying something new. This year we’re growing peppers for the first time.

Rule 3: Grow your own

Children gain so much from seeing how a seed develops into a mature plant that I would encourage everyone to grow something from seed. Sunflowers, peas, beans and lettuce are good ones to choose as they are reliable, quick to germinate and grow fast – giving the kids lots to observe. (You can find several growing experiments to try in The Garden Classroom book.) You don’t need to give over whole areas of space as lots of foods grow well in pots and growbags. We grow herbs, lettuce and radishes in pots and potatoes in a dustbin (just make sure they have drainage holes in the bottom). And we chose small varieties of some plants, such as ballerina apple and pear trees, to suit our space.

Rule 4: Grow something to eat

I find my children are more adventurous and thoughtful about eating healthily because they are experienced at growing it at home. We like to grow some plants that the children can help themselves to, whenever they want a fresh snack: sugar snap peas, cherry tomatoes, strawberries and raspberries.

Rule 5: Welcome wildlife

Welcoming wildlife into your garden is good for the environment, for your fruit and vegetables which need pollinators and predators to eat bugs, and for children who get great science lessons from observing them and how they live.  We double up flowers that are pretty but are also bees’ and butterflies’ favourites (nasturtium, sunflowers, calendula and cornflowers). And we have a bird cafe (which the book shows you how to make).

Rule 6: Appeal to all the senses

Make your small family garden work on lots of levels, with pretty flowers to look at and smell, leaves and wind chimes to hear, different textured leaves to touch and a variety of foods to taste.

Rule 7: Include interesting areas for creative play

We have three main play areas in our garden. Our sand and water table is a place for lots of sensory play, with loose parts including pebbles, shells, fir cones and sticks available for creative play. We also have our imaginary lands made up of our fairy garden, dinosaur land and miniature meadow. (You can find out how to make all three of these in the ebook) And we have our Pixie Palace which is a frame made of bamboo canes bound together with string, which is just big enough for the girls to fit in together. The walls of the Pixie Palace are where we grow our peas and beans.

Rule 8: Be creative with art

The outdoor space gives you the opportunity to go bigger with your art and to be a little messier. I’ll show you how we use the yard floor for big art experiments next week. I’ve painted our shed door in blackboard paint to create an ever changing easel, and we use chalks all over the garden in lots of ways. An extra clothesline along a wall is a great way to hang art to dry and for display, without taking up any extra space. You can find lots of of art projects in the book.

Rule 9: Practice eco-gardening

There are lots of ways to practice eco-friendly gardening, even in a small space. We sadly don’t have room for a compost heap or a rain water butt (though we do have both of those at the School Gardening Club I run) but we do use our left-over coffee grinds as soil improver. We leave one corner of the garden, under the shrubs in the corner, as the wildlife zone, with lots of leaves and bark left for mini beast homes. And we re-use tin cans and up-cycle colanders and Wellington boots as planters. As everything is all together we make sure our garden is organic, so the children are safe to play and eat.

Rule 10: Make mum a spot

Last but not least, among all the thought you give to children, plants and wildlife, make sure to leave some space for you. A little table and chairs are just the spot for my morning coffee, and my favourite place to sit awhile after the girls have gone to bed.

Creative, playful ideas for garden-themed activities

However small your family garden is, I think you will love the ideas in The Garden Classroom and find projects you can enjoy this summer with your children. Come and take a look at the video to see a peek at some of the activities in the book. And if you’d like your own copy. it’s available for instant download. I think you will find a project in it that you could try with your children today!

 Download your copy of The Garden Classroom 

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Here’s how to make sticker resist t-shirts:

How to design your own sticker resist t-shirt

Sometimes I think painted t shirts are the ultimate art project for kids. Not only are they big old blank canvases, ready to take pretty much any art material, they’re rife with the promise of being able to be worn, and shown off to friends and family all. the. time.

The best part about this project? You can find everything at Target (except the paint.) We used acrylic paints, but you can use fabric paint if you prefer. Tempera paint will wash out of the fabric.

The other best part of the project? It’s quick and easy, and holds the attention of even the youngest of art-makers.

Materials:

• Puffy stickers (we found that flat stickers are pretty hard to remove once they’re saturated with paint.)
• White t shirt
• Makeup sponges (the disposable wedge sponges found in the makeup aisle.)
• Acrylic paints

Directions:

Let your kid place the stickers wherever they see fit on the t shirt. This was as fun for Beckett as the painting part; it’s always interesting to see which parts of projects appeal to kids…

Mix up a couple of colors of acrylic paint, adding a tiny amount of water if necessary, to make it more spreadable. Beckett’s very favorite color in the world is turquoise, so I added a small amount of yellow to blue- not too much or it will go green!

Then I gave him the option of a bright orange. (A small amount of the yellow added to red.) Load a makeup sponge up with paint and press it down all over the stickers, covering as much of the t-shirt as you wish.

Remove the stickers after the paint has dried, and throw the shirt on. Strike some poses with superheroes.

More cool art techniques to try

Check out another fun t shirt resist project, made with office stickers and masking tape here. Looking for another quick project for little kids? This classic wax resist painting project never gets old.

Jeanette Nyberg is a creative mom blogger who shares her passion for kids’ art and design, art projects, creative play, and a general love for childhood. In addition to Artchoo.com, she can be found lurking around on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.

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Homemade paint recipe with spices

We started out by choosing our paint colours. Knowing we were going to be adding spices, we picked some earthy colours to match.

Next we paid a visit to our larder to investigate which spices we had. The children enjoyed sniffing all the pots and trying to guess which spice was which – and what food we usually eat them in.

B declared that each spice should match the paint colours, so we paired up…

white with vanilla

yellow with garam masala

{we were out of turmeric!}

orange with ginger

red with mild chilli powder

{I’d suggest using something different if you have young children joining in}

and

brown with cinnamon

For this homemade paint recipe all you need to do is mix in a dash of spice into your tempera / poster paint – as easy as that. How much use depends on how strong you would like the fragance to be. We used around a teaspoon per pot, and a little goes a long way. {If you store the paint in jars with lids you’ll be able to use it over a few different art sessions – depending of course on how many paintings you do.}

And then all you need to do is stir the spice into your paint, until it combines well.

We have had some lovely sunny days this week, so I set up the easel in our back garden. The warm weather made the spice scents even better, but the paint is also great on dark, indoor days as it really gives you a sensory boost and adds some zing to your art session.

The children loved it – and I enjoyed sitting in the sunshine, watching them paint, and smelling all the lovely scents!

Have you ever tried sensory play with spice paint?

More homemade recipes for play

For some more homemade recipes, you might like our easy play dough recipe. And to add in some more sensory play, try our A-Z of playdough flavour recipes.

One of our favourite ways to use scent in play is our lavender sensory tub, which is lovely for chilling out.

And come and follow NurtureStore on Pinterest and take a look at the ideas collected on the  I learn through my SENSES! board.

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If you’d like to have a copy of the weekly play planner delivered straight to your e-mail in box, just pop your e-mail address in the box below. The planner will arrive on a Sunday, ready and waiting with a week’s worth of play ideas for the week ahead.

This week’s Play Planner is sponsored by Jo Jingles, nationwide music, movement and singing classes for babies and pre-schoolers.

With nationwide sessions in more than 700 centres across the UK and Ireland and with over 90 franchisees, Jo Jingles offers well-established, structured classes that are fun, interactive and educational for little ones. Exposure to music and singing at a young age is highly beneficial to early years’ development, helping with speech development and coordination. Singing also builds and strengthens the bonds of trust and communication between adults and children and involving a young baby in musical sessions from an early age can help to encourage their self-expression and confidence in later life.

You can find them on their website, join them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.

Monday’s child is…

playing in a dragon world

Tuesday’s child is…

learning their ABCs

Wednesday’s child is…

cooking up some fun in the back garden (over at BabyCentre)

Thursday’s child is…

making glitter butterflies

Friday’s child is…

making math houses

Saturday’s child is…

playing a sight word games (over at Hands on As We Grow)

Sunday’s child is…

exploring science in the garden (over at Fantastic Fun & Learning)

Visit www.jojingles.com to join in the musical fun and find your nearest class today.  Jo Jingles Birthday parties and celebrations are also available to book and a range of musical-themed merchandise including toys, CDs and musical instruments can be purchased online. 

#sponsored post

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