R LOVES frogs. Ask him what his favourite animal is and you’d better cover your ears before the screams of “FROGS!” begin. His fascination began after we borrowed a book about them from our library when R was around 2 years old. Fast forward two years and his love for amphibious creatures is showing no signs of waning. We’ve created many different frog based small world play scenes. Sometimes they involve water, such as our watery frog pond sensory tub and sometimes, we set up mini play scenes like this one.

Our play scenes provide hours of imaginative fun for R. He loves collecting bits and pieces to add to his collection – twigs, rocks, pebbles, leaves – and he spends almost as much time creating each scene as he does actually playing with it.

Creating a playsape like this is very simple. We used a scrap of blue fabric for the water, and we combined natural elements such as twigs and stones with items we picked up at the dollar store such as plastic leaves and insects.

Altough our set of plastic frogs are not entirely accurate depictions of real life frogs, R still enjoys matching them against the pictures in his frog books and then placing the frogs in their preferred environment. We have a brown frog which R has determined is a ground frog. That frog is always placed underneath a brown peice of fabric representing the dirt and it doesn’t come out again until our play is over. R likes things to be accurate!

On this particular day, R also took out the magnetic fishing game that I made for him. You can read all about it in this post.

 Small world play scenes are so easy to put together and they:

•  encourage creativity and imagination.
• provide opportunities for language development and story telling.
• can be great for fine motor skills as small pieces are picked up, moved and re-arranged.
• help foster a child’s current interest (such as R’s interest in frogs).

If this is your first time visiting One Perfect Day – welcome! If you like what you have found, please join us on our Facebook page. We are always sharing new ideas to play, learn, create and explore.

This post was featured at Apartment Therapy. Thank you Apartment Therapy!

I’m linking this post up with the Learning Laboratory link up over at Mamma Smiles.