Audit Your Small World Play

How do you resource opportunities for small world play? 

 As an early years teacher I would ensure I had small world opportunities in every area of provision. For instance adding small world creatures and loose parts to my malleable area and observe how children make their own props for imaginative story telling. My maths area would also offer challenges around a small world problem in KS1 provision. ‘Like the pirates have found some coins and have to make a total of 20 for Captain Blackbeard by adding coins together.’

 Here are some of my top ingredients for resources and organisation; 

• Offer small world and block play together.  
• Add collections of loose parts to encourage creativity and imaginative story telling. See right brained mom for ideas.  
• Foliage- real and artificial  
• Add a light element; projectors, light box, rope lights and fairy lights.  
• Take small world outside and use natural settings  
• Mirrors  
• Mark making equipment available  
• -eg people 
• Offer different backgrounds like woven place mats, felt squares, mosaic pool tiles...  
• Mini mes of children

Small world figure resourcing.

Think of the age of your children. Are your children still young and need wooden figures that are more robust? Or are they in KS1 and can take care with more detailed and delicate figures? 

• Animals and wildlife  
• Pets 
• British wildlife  
• Jungle wildlife  
• Desert wildlife  
• MINIBEAST  
• Reptiles  
• Sea creatures  
• Farm animals  
• Birds 
• Transport  
• Planes 
• Trains 
• Cars 
• Motorbikes  
• Boats 
• Fantasy 
• Dragons 
• Knights 
• Unicorns  
• Aliens  
• Princes, prince, king, queen 
• Dinosaurs

Introduce each type slowly to the children and help them to tidy and sort these away by asking them to create labels for them. If you display all your small world resources the first day you will just end up with tipping! We need discussions around the items and books linked to them. For instance talk about children’s own experiences of wandering through a wood. What could they see and hear?

Space

Think about if your small world space can be in a little quiet nook or in an exciting case. What will grab the children’s interest to play here?

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