Mr McGregor's Garden

This simple playdough small world activity is wonderful for toddlers and children who enjoy playdough, loose part play and Peter Rabbit. It hadn’t been my intention that my son would create this own Mr McGregor’s garden. I simply thought the green playdough would create a nice garden if that’s what my son wanted to make. It was his idea to make Mr McGregor’s garden.

Although this isn’t technically a loose parts play set up, it follows some of it’s principles. Loose parts play is an important part of a child’s playtime because it encourages so many important skills, such as imagination, creativity, problem solving and curiosity. Loose parts play is open ended play and ideally there should be no adult direction in how and what a child does with the collection of materials. However the teacher in me can’t help but ask open questions to develop my 2 year old’s language.

Set Up

For this Peter Rabbit playdough small world activity I used green playdough, buttons, sugared carrots and daisies, wooden animals, pieces of our Christmas tree and an aquarium plant. You could also add green and felt balls as lettuces and radishes if you had these at home.

Through my questioning and commenting throughout this playdough activity, we worked on encouraging my son’s story telling, thinking skills, positional language and speech and language skills.

The garden was landscaped a number of times before we got the finished product.

I have kept the playdough together with the other parts of this activity and my son will often ask if we can recreate his garden together.