It’s toy rotation time again. I do a toy rotation at the beginning of each month for my 3 year old son and 5 year old daughter. After a month, most of the toys we have out are stale and receive very little attention. Anything still being played with stays out for the next month. If you’re interested in more information on how I do toy rotations, check out my other toy rotation posts here.
We will be doing some ocean and beach play over the next few weeks so I brought out all of our related toys. I like matching our toy rotation to the activity themes we will be doing. I think helps inspire the kids to think of new ways to use their toys and I find it easier to already have most of our resources out and within reach. I have linked the toys that I could below.
June Toys
Plan Toys Pirate Ship set – thrifted (felt anchor is from Sewing Seeds Play*)
This month is our last month in this house. We’re moving at the beginning of next month. So this will be our last toy rotation that looks like this. I think we are ready for a slightly updated system anyway. Stay tuned to see what we do at our new house.
Last week, we explored the topic of construction in our play. Vehicles and construction tends to be something that interests my 3 year old son, more than my 5 year old daughter; however, I was pleasantly surprised that both kids dove into these activities and had a blast.
1. Construction Trains Sensory Play
We love our trains and wooden tracks and usually set up a big track to play with every few weeks. This time, I thought it would be fun to use our Tuff Tray and fill it with some sensory material to compliment the train track play.
I used our Brio Cargo Mountain set that my son got for his birthday last summer along with some very decadent construction sensory mixes from The Creative Mix to make this tray. I added a few rocks, felt balls and trains… and that’s it. I love a toy plus sensory base activity. It’s so easy to set up and a great way to give new life to toys you already have.
The kids had a great time sending their trains down the track to pick up rocks and rubble and exploring what materials could fit in their train cars. They also added some farm accessories to the play and created some small world stories about animals taking rides on the train and bringing materials to the barn.
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2. Construction Sensory Flisat Table Play
The wood bridge, ramp and magnetic tile shoot in this activity were a huge hit with my kids. We left this play table out for most of the week. They had such a great time sending felt balls and sensory filler down the magnetic tile shoot, loading and dumping materials, traveling over the bridge from one bin to another and making up their own little construction stories.
We also spend some time exploring what else might be able to fit down the magnetic tile construction shoot and the kids were delighted to discover one of their small cars was able to make it through.
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3. Wooden Trucks and Loose Parts Play
One of the easiest and most engaging activities we do is combining Fagus wooden trucks with Grapat mandala loose parts. It’s such a simple combination and yet, it leads to hours of imaginative play. Both my 5 yr old daughter and 3 yr old son love these 2 toys. We’ve slowly been collecting Fagus trucks and Grapat’s mandala piecesfor years now. I continue to add to the collections because they continue to remain a favourite here.
I used our Tuff Tray to contain the mandala pieces this time, but my kids will often just dump them all over the floor and play. It works just as well without a special tray.
Finally, I set up a simple construction Tuff Tray with Kinetic Sand. Kinetic Sand is always a favourite in our house, so I just added some building supplies and let the kids imaginations do the rest. They came up with some very creative ways to use the logs and bricks while engaging in some STEM building and, of course, they had a wonderful time with the sand.
Last week, we enjoyed a number of bee sensory activities in the lead-up to World Bee Day on May 20, 2024. We love bees and find learning about them to be fascinating, especially when we learn through play.
1. Dandelion Playdough Treats
We kicked-off our bee play week with a playdough invitation using Dandelion Playdough from Readymade Play Canada. We made some dandelion and honey ice creams, popsicles and pies for ourselves and the bees. Some fresh dandelions topped off our creations.
Materials
Dandelion Dough and Honeybee Cutters – Readymade Play Canada (save with code PLAY 10)
Yellow Door Let’s Roll Seasons, Within & Co Signature 55 Mat – Sewing Seeds Play (save with code HOUSEOFPLAY10)
Honey Pot Wood Tray – AW & Co. (save with code HOUSEOFPLAY10)
Ice cream scoop, ice cream cones, wood popsicles, wood cherries – from Eye Spy Club and Cjeco-Play Ice Cream Play Kit
Resin Bees – Playspiration
2. Bee Sensory Play
Next, we set up a sensory bee invitation to play on our IKEA Flisat table. My kids are very interested in bees and love to learn about them. We’ve read the book, “Discover the Busy World of the Beehive” many, many times. The kids like that it talks about the different types of bees and the various jobs they are responsible for in the hive.
This bee sensory invitation to play provided lots of hexagons, honeycomb shapes and sensory textures for the exploration of bee concepts. The kids enjoyed scooping and pouring the DIY sensory mix into the flisat insert and the other containers provided. However, putting everything into the woven beehive was definitely the highlight of this activity. My 3 year old wanted the bees to be “cozy” in their hive.
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3. Slime Bee Honey Play
My 5 year old daughter is in her slime era – she loves the feel of slime. When I saw this adorable honey slime kit from Olive Eve and Co, I knew it would be a huge hit with the kids. I added some of our other resin bee treasures and containers to compliment the kit. We also added our Kidfolk and Co. yellow slime from Easter (which is still stretchy, slimy and fun) and the kids enjoyed exploring the different textures of the 2 slimes. One was more gooey and the other, stretchy. They enjoyed going from one to the other and mixing the two together.
Materals
Slime Kit (honey slime, slime add-ins, resin honeycomb plates, honey pot stamp, bees, honey stick) – Olive Eve and Co.
Within and co Signature 55 Mat – Sewing Seeds Play (save with code HOUSEOFPLAY10)
Dandelions are the perfect addition to mud kitchen play. They are abundant at this time of year, easy to pick and the petals can be taken off the flowers to mix into various “delicious” concoctions. My kids and their friend came up with this creation – Dandelion Coffee. It was made using soil, water and, of course, dandelion petals. This is a great, messy play activity to do outdoors on a nice day – plus, it’s free.
5. Beekeeping Small World Play
On Monday, May 20th we celebrated World Bee Day and the theme for 2024 was “Bee engaged with Youth.” The theme recognizes the importance of involving and teaching youth about bees and beekeeping – as they are the future stewards of our environment.
My kids (3 and 5 years old) are fascinated by bees and what takes place in a beehive. We have a community beehive outside our house and the kids like to visit and ask questions. With the help of some of our favourite small shops, I made a small world beekeeping tray to further explore the topic. There was a beehive box with a beekeeper, some flowers with pollen pom poms, a lake for a bee water source and some of our hexagon trays and pieces to represent inside the beehive. I also included a pasta honeycomb and some sensory fillers that the kids could scoop and fill, use as honey, pollen, nectar, or whatever their imaginations desired.
The sensory mix fillers were DIY. The filler in the yellow tray is a mixture of rice, lentils, dry chick peas, dry corn and pasta flowers. Everything is it’s natural colour – I didn’t paint anything. The filler in the wooden bowls is yellow split peas.
I pasta honeycomb was also a DIY, made out of dry rigatoni pasta for an extra sensory element. I just used hot glue to secure the pasta pieces together. My kids found the honeycomb satisfying to break apart, which I did not love, but managed to tolerate. It’s just pasta and glue and I can always make another.
This tray was a great way to explore what bees do everyday and all the busy jobs they get up to. There is so much to appreciate about bees!
Materials
Felt bees, beehives, tulips, and bee kaleidoscope – Sewing Seeds Play (save with code HOUSEOFPLAY10)
We love the book Bug Hotel by Libby Walden and Clover Robin. My kids like the idea of bugs living together in a cozy hotel so much that we thought we’d try building our own.
For the “hotel”, I used a cardboard box with 2 bamboo utsenil box inserts from Dollarama. Then I placed a number of materials in the tray that the kids could put in the hotel for different insect habitats. The Bug Hotel book provides the perfect guidance for this activity. Our habitat materials were mostly gathered from around the house and outside. We used mini stumps, pine needles, sticks, pinecones, scrunched paper filler, seed heads, moss, egg carton, bamboo pieces, toilet paper rolls. I also cut some slits in pieces of cardboard to use for butterfly habitats. Everything was easy to collect, with the exception of the bamboo pieces. I bought the bamboo pole from Dollarama and had to use some muscle to cut it into 2-3 inch pieces with a saw.
Other Materials Used in the Activity:
Bug Hotel by Libby Walden and Clover Robin – Amazon
Bugs in the Garden Dirt Scented Sensory Bin in a Bag – Readymade Play Canada (code PLAY10) (note: I used 2 bags of dirt scented filler here)
Felt ladybug, bees, butterfly & Safari Ltd. life cycle figures – Sewing Seeds Play (code HOUSEOFPLAY10)
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My kids really enjoyed this activity and used the book as a reference for creating various habitats for the different insects. There were a number of textures to explore as well as an exploration of containment as they tried to fill the open spaces with different materials. The small assembled Bug Hotel went outside immediately so that real bugs could move in as soon as possible.
The kids have been loving the book, Gotta Go! Gotta Go! by Sam Swope about the monarch butterfly life cycle and migration.
I thought it might be fun to show the kids a map of how far the monarchs travel, so they could get a better sense of their amazing journey. I put the map over our Lite Brite trofast insert and used the lights to plot the migration path from central Canada to Mexico. Along with the map, I included the Safari Ltd. monarch life cycle figures, a Folkmanis Monarch Butterfly finger puppet and a bin of sensory filler for the caterpillars and butterflies to play in. I also decided to make an easy monarch themed jar for scooping rice into. I used some paper butterflies from Dollarama and secured them to the jar with Mod Podge.
The kids loved this activity and have enjoyed acting out the life cycle and journey of the monarch butterfly. And of course, we have read the book many, many times. They now know very well that monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico!
If you saw our toy rotation post for this month, then you know the Folkmanis Bird Finger Puppets and the Backyard Bird Songs book are currently in our toy rotation. The kids have been fascinated by learning about the birds and they especially want to know what the birds eat. So, I thought a sensory/ small world/ learning tray might be fun activity for them.
I used the Bugs in the Garden kit from Readymade Play Canada to make this tray. The kit includes dirt scented sensory filler that really smells like dirt and makes the scene seem so much more realistic. Then I added in our paper maché tree from a previous play, our large resin pondscape, some moss and some scrunched paper filler to fill up the tray. It was the perfect scene for our little birds and their food sources.
The kids dove right into this activity and wanted to explore all the different types of bird food available (worms, insects, seeds, berries). The artificial worms, in particular, were a big hit. They are very stretchy and added an extra interesting sensory texture to the tray.
My 3 year old son spent a lot of time acting out little scenes with the birds. One of his favourites was bringing all the birds and insects inside the tree because it was raining.
It was a great way to extend our play with the Folkmanis finger puppet birds and add a sensory element to our learning about what birds eat.
A little after-school sensory play is sometimes just what we need. While my daughter was dipping her hands in slime she said, “this makes me feel so calm… it just feels so good!”
Olive Eve and Co.’s Large Pondscape is definitely the star of the show here! How gorgeous is this resin piece? It arrived at our house and was in a play setup within an hour. I couldn’t wait to use it. Once my kids are past the sensory play stage, this will be going on a display shelf in my house. It is art.
The green slime is from Zimpli Kids. It was so easy to make, just mix the powder with water and wait 15 minutes. It made for such an easy sensory setup that delighted my kids. I also found the slime easy to clean up with a little soap and water. That’s a win in my book!
Last week, I attended a Scholar’s Choice free webinar hosted by Teresa Hadley (Instagram handle @joys.of.learning) called “Small Worlds, Big Stories: Inspiring Storytelling and Writing Play”. Teresa showed many inspiring small world play ideas, but the one I was drawn to the most was a open-ended type of small world play where the young learners could choose what kind of stories they want to tell.
If you know me, then you know I love an epic setup – and I think there is a place for it. Both my kids and I enjoy it and it probably provides some good modelling for them. However, sometimes I worry I’m doing too much of the creative thinking up front and complicating the activity more than I need to.
So, when I saw Teresa’s simple, pared down approach to a small world play invitation – I wanted to try it and see what my kids did with it.
What is Small World Play?
Small World Play is using imagination and small props to create miniature or scaled-down scenes where stories can take place. A common example would be using blocks and figures to create stories about a family living in a house. Kids will often start by acting out stories they are familiar with (e.g., eating dinner, taking a bath and brushing their teeth) and then will expand into more imaginative and fantastical stories as they get older.
Our Experience with this Open-Ended Small World Play Activity
My kids do a lot of small world play; however, this type of small world play invitation was a bit new for them. Of course, they are used to using toys and other loose parts to create their own small worlds in an “open-ended” manner, but they haven’t been presented with that type of play in an activity tray. They were a bit hesitant at first.
The progression of play was
1. They coloured the wood peg people as representations of themselves (of course they did, my kids love to colour natural wood! lol)
2. They started experimenting with the materials and threaded some branches through bead holes.
3. Then the play kind of stalled, and they left the activity.
4. The next morning I tried modelling what they might do with the materials – I drew a road and put out a basic foundation for a house… and then the play exploded.
5. They drew more roads, they each built their own house across the street from each other and put a sidewalk in between. They veered into some STEM building with their houses, which was great! They made gardens, deserts where lizards could live, and stacked cups on top of each other for a “hideout” at each house.
So, in the end, this turned out super fun and I loved watching their creativity. We will be trying more of this type of invitation, now that the kids have a taste for it. I think it adds some wonderful variety into the type of activities we do and encourages the kids to use their imagination and creativity in new ways.
We love the Stick and Stone books by Beth Ferry. My 3 year old son, especially, is a huge fan of these characters and their tales of friendship.
I thought it would be fun to try a book play activity with the kids. We are new to book play and I don’t know if we’re really doing it “right”. However, my philosophy when doing any of these activities for my kids, is to keep it fun and that’s the same focus I applied to this activity.
Both kids know this book well, so I kept it very relaxed, provided no instruction or prompts and let the kids decide where they wanted to take the play. First, they spent some time exploring the different trees with Stick and Stone (in the book, the characters are on a quest to find Stick’s family tree). Then they wanted to read the book and finally they dug into some sensory play.
This was the first time this year we were able to take our sensory play table outside and it felt so good to enjoy a nice evening with a relaxing activity for the kids in the fresh air.
We don’t have a fancy mud kitchen (although I would love one), but I still wanted to give my kids the mud kitchen experience. Mud kitchens have to be up there with sandboxes for one of the original sensory experiences.
I put together this mud kitchen very inexpensively. I found some old milk crates and a piece of plywood in the garage for the counter. Then I went through our pots, pans, utensils and bath toys in our house and pulled out anything that wasn’t being used anymore or looked like fun. The soil is left over from a Christmas planter arrangement and the only things I really needed to buy were the drink dispenser water jug and food stones.
We’ve been using this setup for a few years now and while it isn’t fancy, it works great and the kids love it. I’d also easy to put away and store in the garage when we’re not using it.
You only really need dirt and water to have some mud kitchen fun, but there are a few accessories that we find add some extra excitement to our play.
Favourite Mud Kitchen Accessories
1. Drink Dispenser filled with water. Ours is a glass one from Canadian Tire. I thought glass would be easier to keep clean, but there are acrylic options if you’re concerned about it breaking.
2. Green Toys Tea Set and Stacking Cups. Green Toys makes such great toys for the outdoors. These things are indestructible.
3. Squeeze Bottles from Dollarama. I have ended up with a bunch of these because when friends come over, everyone wants one of these squeeze bottles. The plastic has the perfect flexibility for little hands to squeeze.
4. Empty Spice Containers – save your empty spice containers! They are so fun for filling with dirt, water, old spices, anything. They give the kids a sense of real cooking.
5. Spice Box. This is new to us this year and the kids have been loving it. You can fill it with spices, potion powder, Oobleck, dried leaves, flowers, anything you can think of. It’s very durable and cleans easily, although I do store it inside because I want to use it for indoor play as well.
6. Yellow Door Stones – the one splurge in our Mud Kitchen and they are totally worth it. We have the Fruits, Pizza Toppings, Breads of the world and Sensory Sound Eggs and they are all wonderful. We leave them outside all year and they still look new. Mine are from Sewing Seeds Play (save with code HOUSEOFPLAY10) and Scholars Choice.
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I’d love to know, what are your favourite mud kitchen accessories??
