Some homemade play dough and a few loose parts, together with a child’s imagination, soon make a fabulous jungle small world.

Here’s one way we use play dough for imaginary play and story telling.

Jungle small world :: play dough fun

On offer today we had some homemade green play dough, some leaves and flowers picked from the garden, and a few stalks of broccoli. What could we make?

A jungle small world! My daughter started off by rolling out her landscape…

and then began adding in all the loose parts we had available.

Play dough is a great material as the base for a play scene – the children can mould it, shape it, and it’s good for holding up other materials, such as our flowers and leaves.

Now her jungle small world might not be exactly true to life, but her play was packed with chatting, imagination and story telling.

Playing with small worlds is a great way for children to test out ideas they’ve learned elsewhere – such as the ideas that giraffes can eat leaves from very tall trees…

and to try out creative ideas – such as fetching a fork from the drawer to see it she could make some grass for the rabbits.

And play dough small worlds are perfect for story telling. These lions are called Leo and Athlete and feature in lots of her stories.