Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell is one of those picture books that ends up in almost every home with a small child. The lift-the-flap structure works for the youngest reader because each page is a small surprise. The zoo sends an animal, the child lifts the flap, and decides whether it’s the right one. The kid I was reading to had it half-memorized by age three and was still asking for it at five.
I decided to set the kid the challenge of creating his own Dear Zoo Small World. The small world would feature animals from the story and use items found around the house. I selected most of the resources, but the kid could create what he wanted and ask for any other materials.
A small world is a curated tray or surface where the child arranges figures and props to retell or invent a story. It sits between block play and role-play. For book tie-ins, it gives the child a reason to revisit the story while letting them choose how it plays out, which is the part book-only readings cannot do.
We have been playing this off and on since 2017. The frames are still in the craft drawer.
Six animals, six enclosures
The frames were two plain wooden picture frames with the glass and backing removed, picked up from a dollar-store-style shop. With the glass out, the frame becomes an open box you can fill. Two of them lined up gave us six sections (three per frame). The animals were a giraffe, lion, elephant, monkey, snake and frog. The first three came from a plastic zoo playset and the other three from a bath-squirter pack. We did not have a camel, which the kid pointed out as a problem.
The pile of bits on the table looked like this:
- Plain wooden lollipop sticks and a separate pack of brightly colored ones
- A pack of plastic ball-point pens shaped like blades of grass
- Three or four small scrubbing sponges
- A handful of round wooden dowels (the kind sold for craft skewers)
- A bundle of jumbo yellow drinking straws
- A small box of wooden push pins
- A strip of cork-effect adhesive tape
- Several colors of Play-Doh
- A handful of blue and clear glass pebbles
First the kid decided where each animal would live in the zoo. He reasoned that the elephant would need the most room and that the lion had to be kept away from the giraffe and the monkey. The frog could have three smaller sections so he could hop between each one.
The kid set about creating the elephant enclosure. He decided that as elephants were gray they needed lots of color in their home. He tried to get the colored lollipop sticks to stand upright by themselves. That did not work, so I showed him how to place Play-Doh in the picture frame and then push the lollipop sticks into it. He chose a mixture of red and blue Play-Doh to keep with the colorful theme.
For the giraffe enclosure he used yellow Play-Doh as the base “because giraffes are yellow” and then the jumbo yellow drinking straws because “they are tall and the giraffe is tall so he can see out of them.”
He decided that monkeys like long grass to play in, so pushed the grass-shaped ball-point pens into green Play-Doh. At the time of the activity he had no idea the grass blades were actually pens. He was shocked the next day when I demonstrated how he could write with them.
For the lion enclosure he decided that the lion needed some rocks to sit on. He placed the scrubbing sponges in the middle and surrounded them with yellow Play-Doh. As the lion was “naughty and mean” he used the tall round wooden dowels to complete his home.
He decided that a snake does not move much, so the snake did not need anything to keep him in the zoo. Instead he used wooden push pins to make sure people did not disturb the snake. The pins would not push into the wooden frame, so I cut a strip of cork-effect tape, laid it inside the frame, and the kid pushed the pins into that. Finally, he placed blue and clear glass pebbles in the frog enclosure because the frog would “like to swim and hop all day.”
He took it apart the next day
The zoo stayed together for one day. By the next morning the kid had decided the animals wanted to live in different homes, dismantled the whole thing, and started rebuilding it from scratch with the same materials. That ended up being the right read on the activity. The result was not the destination. The building was.
If you set this out, expect a rebuild. The picture frames make the parts feel discrete enough that a small kid can wipe one enclosure clean and start over without disturbing the others. The Play-Doh holds its shape long enough for several cycles before it dries out. After a week the dried Play-Doh gets brushed out and the frames go back in the drawer until someone asks for them again.
For a quieter follow-up that uses the same animals, the animal coloring pages cover elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest on paper.