This one starts with a walk. Gather a basket of leaves, moss, acorns, bark, and twigs, tip them into a shallow tray, and add a handful of toy dinosaurs. In a couple of minutes you have a prehistoric jungle for small-world play, made almost entirely of things you found for free on the way home. Ages 2 to 5.
Gathering the materials
Collecting is half the activity. A walk in the woods or a wander round the garden with a bag or basket turns into a treasure hunt: big leaves and small ones, soft moss, knobbly bark, acorns, conkers, and the odd interesting stick. Children are brilliant at spotting things, and chatting about what you find, the colors, the textures, which leaf is biggest, is quiet early science along the way.
Setting up the jungle
Tip everything into a shallow tray, a builder’s tray or a large low tub, and let a child help arrange it. Pile the moss into hills, lay the bark out as logs, scatter the leaves as a canopy, and dot the acorns through as boulders and eggs. Then bring in the dinosaurs and the world comes alive.
How it plays
A small world like this runs itself once it is set up. Dinosaurs stomp through the leaves, hide under the bark, and munch on the foliage, and a child narrates the whole thing, which is wonderful for imaginative play and language. Underneath the story there is plenty of handling of different natural textures, the crunch of dry leaves against soft moss, and lots of careful moving of small pieces, which is good for the hands too.
It costs nothing, it changes every time depending on what you find, and when you are done the leaves and moss go back out to the garden. Swap the dinosaurs for plastic minibeasts or farm animals and the same tray of natural materials becomes a whole new world.
For another dinosaur sensory tray, our dinosaur smelly swamp sensory bin adds scent to the play, and our free dinosaur coloring pages are a quiet follow-up once the jungle is packed away.