There’s something so wonderful about creating a small world to play with.
Whether your child loves dolls, trains, dinosaurs or diggers, setting up a miniature land, where they can imagine, role play, chat and act our stories, is packed full of play and learning potential.
Here are fifteen of our favourite small world play ideas, and invitation for you to join in with us.
Here’s a sunshine play dough recipe idea that’s great for sensory play for summer and the solstice.
Click play on the video above to see our playdough masterclass.
This video gives you everything you ever wanted to know about play dough: how to make homemade playdough with quick and easy recipes; the benefits of playdough for children; and lots of sensory play activities using play dough including playdough math activities, playdough literacy activities, and playdough fine motor skills activities.
Plus find out how to get printable playdough recipe cards and printable play mats. It’s an excellent beginners guide to play dough!
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We never need much excuse to bring out the play dough and as we’re learning all about the solstice this week we thought we’d make some play dough sunshines. To start, we mixed up a batch of our favourite easy play dough recipe and added in some yellow food colouring to make it nice and sunny.
Then we raided the craft shelves to find some yellow, orange and gold materials. We found drinking straws, buttons, foil shapes and sequins, craft sticks and some glittery paper strips.
Play dough is a fantastic sensory material for children to explore and it’s always great to add in some extra textures when you play.
To get some inspiration we did a Google Image search for ‘sun art’ and the children enjoyed clicking through to see the sun pictures and got some ideas for how they might make a sun with their play dough. They especially liked the mosaic artwork – an idea for a future art technique to explore!
Then the children set to work. One of the best things about play dough is that everyone can use it, from babies to grandparents! It’s an open-ended material and so versatile, and today the children all had clear ideas about how they were going to use the materials on offer to make their sun.
Every sunshine turned out different… and glorious!
Dive into our archive of seaside crafts and beach-themed activities, along with our favourite children’s books about the sea.
Here’s how we combined the garden’s ingredients with some sensory and imaginary play this week: garden flower play dough.
Here’s a favourite idea from our kids painting archive, introducing children to watercolour painting and trying out a whole new – and rather exciting! – way of using it.
You know when your children make something and there is a buzz in the air because they’re so pleased with what they’ve made? This sun weaving which we made as a solstice crafts was one of those moments. The children loved the whole process and the end result. Here’s how we made them.
