The City

We love a small world activity based around a story because it can develop so many important skills including a child’s imagination and speech and language. A small world activity also enables our children to build a mental picture of the story; what the characters look like, how they talk, what the scenery is like. This helps develop empathy as our children are exposed to how the characters are feeling throughout the story. This in turn helps them to learn about their own emotions.

Set Up

This small world activity inspired by The Last Tree in the City uses the grey playdough as the road, the rosemary, wood slices and the box to create the buildings in the city. The first step involved M using the cardboard from the box to draw her own sky scrapers and other buildings on. M was so into this we got another box out of the recycling so she could create more.

Next we set up the city. I cut out M’s sky scrapers whilst she rolled out the play dough. Using some of the play dough we propped the sky scrapers and other buildings up. The rosemary became our last tree in the city.

Then we started to play. F got stuck in at this point and really enjoyed hiding the boy behind the sky scrapers and playing peekaboo. Throughout this city themed small world both girls were developing their language and also their understanding of the story and what it would be like to live in a world without nature. M said at the end of the activity “I prefer to live with trees and colours. The colourless city is so boring.”