Farm Yard

Animals remain a popular feature in our small world play. They are just so versatile; you can feed them, you can make them move, you can get them to go to sleep….. Once you have the animals in your collection of toys they are so quick to set up and depending how much detail you put into your farm it is super easy to tidy up and can stay out for the rest of the day.

Set Up

The animals that we have are from Sainsburys. For about £10 you get a huge tub of farm animals with trees, hay bales, troughs and fences. The tractor and trailer was from the Early Learning Centre and the mat is from Ikea.

I didn’t want this small world session to be overly messy, so I just added a small amount of water to the bowl the the goose sat in.

I often have different activities out in the afternoon because my son has a short attention span and likes to flit between things. As soon as he came down from his nap this is always the first activity to heads over to.

For an activity like this and now that he is approaching 2, I will often sit opposite him and commentate on what he is doing and ask him questions. When he was younger I would move the animals around, make the appropriate animals sounds and pretend to give them food and water.

There are so much you can do with plastic animals likes these. You could put oats out for them to eat, shred green paper for grass, add water to the troughs. It just depends how messy you want to get.