Small World Play
Small World Play is an amazing resource for children to learn through play. There’s a large variety of materials to use when setting one up. I would love to share with you the process of how we made some small world play items for the fawns.
Wooden animals from Ark and Luna
Fences
- Gather some sticks, straight works best but a little curve is fine too. With a small saw, cut them into roughly equal lengths for the vertical posts and then equal lots for the horizontal posts, based on how long you’d like your fences. We made two sizes to use as a rectangular pen for our animals.
- Once you’ve finished cutting all your pieces, figure out which sides of the posts will sit up best and where your posts will connect best. Do this with all of them before applying glue. You could use wood glue, I just used a glue gun on all of these. You can put a finished fence down to use as a guide when making your others so the horizontal posts sit roughly the same.
- You can leave your fences in separate sections for easy storage. If you want to make one big pen you could just attach your horizontal posts to one vertical corner post instead of having two in each corner.
Trees
- Gather some thick sticks, small pine cones, and some different leaves.
- Cut the sticks into the lengths that you’d like your tree trunks.
- For your pinecone trees simply file the base of the pinecone so there’s a flat surface and glue it onto the tree trunk.
- For your other trees, you can drill multiple small holes into the top of the trunk or one medium-sized hole into the top center of your trunk. Then you can add in and mix up what leaves you use and what kind of trees you want them to be.
Platform/Bridge/Slide/Bench
This one really is open-ended too. So many uses to be imaginative with. I used wooden loose parts that I got from Riot but you could use thick bark, rectangular wood pieces etc
- Figure out how long you want your platform to be. Glue the pieces together side by side.
- Glue two sticks along underneath to help provide it with extra stability and rise if you put it on a flat surface.
Teepee/Hut
- Gather small twigs and sticks. Figure out roughly how tall you’d like your structure to be and cut some sticks to that length. I had about 20 to start with.
- Using 4 of the sticks, arrange them as the base of a 4 pole teepee. Once you’ve figured out your frame shape with the angles they need to sit at, glue the front two sticks together at the top. Then the back two.
- Once you have the frame you can start gluing other sticks and twigs around the back and sides. Add as many as you need to fill large gaps, at this point shorter sticks and twigs are fine too.
- After you have finished with the basic structure, weave some rope through roughly all over. Then if you wish you can weave in leaves or sprigs to finish it off.
