Farm Small World Sensory Play

Do your kids love farms and animals? Create a farmyard small world play scene using simple sensory elements from your kitchen cupboard! This is a simple and easy to use sensory play activity also uses nature play materials – it’s quick to set up and you can pick and choose between the messier elements or sensory play elements that are easy to tidy away. (For more tips on mess free messy play – read ‘Messy Play without the Tidy Up!’) To make your Farm Small World Sensory Play even more realistic, you could even read a farm focused children’s book and play along with the farm animals as you go!

Ingredients for Farmyard Small World Play

It’s all about farms in our house lately: farm books, farm songs, farm animal noises and farm pretend play. The kids just can’t get enough of playing farms, which makes a nice change from ‘packing to go on holiday!’ You can use easy nature play materials like logs and twigs and hay. Or a less messier alternative is to use shredding packing paper that you get in deliveries or through your post. Use packing paper is great if you also want to add a water trough or some mud slime to get really messy and lifelike with your farm! For super quick tidying up these mini wood slices are great play items, they are fun and stackable and you can buy them from Amazon here, they can be used for so many different kind of small worlds – fairy gardens, dinosaur small worlds etc….. Using artificial grass can also make the farmyard seem more realistic – you can buy these in any size here. And don’t forget that play dough is a brilliant sensory play items for playing with in a small world setting. Archie had lots of fun making footprints with his farm animals in the play dough.

Kitchen Items for Small World Sensory Play

A cheap and easy way to create a farm small world play set up, is to use items from the kitchen cupboard. You can use anything you have to hand, but our favourites are cereal such as shredded wheat for hay or oats for animal feed. Black beans are also great for pebbles and green rice makes great grass! Read here to find out how to die rice for safely sensory play. A bag of unpopped popcorn is the perfect sensory material and looks the part as if it really belongs on the Farm!

GLTC Wooden Farmyard Review

The perfect accompaniment to any farm small world sensory play is this beautiful wooden Willow Tree Farmyard from the Great Little Trading Company. It’s great for playing with sensory materials as it’s wooden and wipe clean and easy to tidy up little pieces as the roofs are removable. The farm is great for multiple kids playing at once as there is 360 degrees play with stable doors on each side and taking off the roof means you can access the farm from all angles. It’s so beautifully painted and designed with a pulley for kids to use to pile up the food for the animals or hoist up an animal to the stable roof! The animals are chunky for preschoolers to hold easily and study enough to withstand toddler play but they also have cute little felt ears! I love all the GLTC wooden painted toys for their lovely attention to detail but they are also crafted to last and this farmyard will certainly be a beautiful toy that we’ll keep in the family for a long time to come!

Disclosure: We were sent the farmyard by Great Little Trading Company in exchange for this blog post. All words, photos and opinions are my own.

More Sensory Play Posts…

• Autumn Sensory Play
• Quick and Easy Sensory Play Ideas for preschoolers
• Spring Sensory Play ideas for preschoolers