Indoor fairy garden small world play

As you might know we here at We are Happy Playing are totally in love with all things fairy. We turned our reading corner into an enchanted fairy inspired reading nook (here). We've also made an indoor fairy garden for my daughter's bedroom (here), and had lots of fun making paper mache fairy houses (here). Today I have chosen to write about our fairy garden small world play that my daughter has been enjoying over the last few months.

For our indoor fairy garden small world we used

• 1 Tray half full with play sand. 
• A range of plastic flowers
• assorted craft shells
• blue pebbles
• Plastic deco stones
• twigs from outside
• blue foam board cut in pond and river shapes
• tiny cocktail drink umbrellas 
• coins
• wooden animal figures on sticks
• pieces of twirled bark
• coloured potpourri sticks
• some odds and ends like mini clay pots and ceramic deco flowers
• little handmade fairies 
• Kinder Surprise plastic gnomes
• small pine cones

The play session began with my daughter building the fairy garden. Unlike most small world play, our fairy garden small world play allows the child to be responsible for setting up the small world's landscape. With this 'game' it is the adult's responsibility to simply supply the child with as many different 'fairy' things to build their garden with and to sit back and watch.

At the beginning of her first fairy garden small world play session my daughter started by establishing where the water features and rocks would go.

Once the ponds, rivers and paths were in place she started adding her fairy house, ornaments like ceramic posts, wooden fence.

















After this stage was finished, the little monkey decided it was time to hide 'treasure' for the fairies to search for later. For this my daughter used some coins I had given her. She buried them around the place in 'secret hiding places'. 

Finally finishing touches were addded such as the umbrellas, little animals, fairies and flowers. 

 

Once the garden was finished my daughter continued to play with her enchanted play set, playing out scenarios where the fairies went searching for treasure, or where they needed to find their way home through the flower forest or where the fairies simply played with the little animals sunbathing all together under the 'beach' umbrellas.  

The garden itself also evolved over the course of the play sessions as my little one continued to arrange and rearrange the flowers and rocks etc. By the time the play session was finished most of the flowers had been removed and replaced by ditches in the sand where the fairies had dug for treasure. The animals too were set to one side and the stones were rearranged to make different paths leading to the lakes. 

All in all I couldn't be more happy with the outcome. The fairy garden small world had required my daughter to use her imagination to the limit. Nothing was fixed, the play possibilities almost endless. It didn't even matter if my daughter played with the fairies at the end, for it was a great enough effort just to build the landscape in the first place. 

I hope this post has given you some ideas for your own fairy garden small world play. Maybe you could make a winter version? If you do send us some photos and leave a comment below. 

Until next time, happy playing.