{Imaginary Play Fairy Garden - Outdoor Play Party}

Making a Fairy Garden

for Imaginary Play

This week we made a fairy garden outdoors. We had an indoor fairyland in the winter, but now that summer is on the way and we are playing outdoors pretty much all day long these days, we wanted to have an outdoor set-up for imaginary play with our fairies.

So we got a big, plastic flowerpot (on casters for easy movability), and filled it with potting soil. I wanted to make it with soil so they could have the sensory experience of playing in the 'dirt', and because Sweet Pea loves to dig around and grab handfuls of soil from our other potted flowers that we don't necessarily want dug up! At least this one she's allowed to play with.

We planted some real flowers that Princess Pea picked out at the gardening shop, and we had a plastic castle from our sandbox that we put in. They don't show up well in the pictures, but we made some butterflies on stakes by glueing pre-cut foam butterfly shapes on each side of a craft stick (much like how we made our heart toothpick toppers).

We also made fake play flowers out of cut-up slices of pool noodles with pipe-cleaners stuck into the bottoms of them. And we added some corks for stepping stones/seats, some mushrooms (they're on wires for flower arrangements), and some figures - fairies, a dragon, and a frog.

Finally, I found some cute garden stakes with chalkboard sides that the girls used to write welcome notes to entice the fairies to come and live there!

And the best part is that all the pieces except the real flowers are moveable, so they can create and recreate their fairy world as much as they like!

On to the Outdoor Play Party!

Did you see this post among the 42 ideas for outdoor play linked up last time? 

15 Ways for Outdoor Play for Baby, Toddler, Child shared by Angelique Felix.

This and more great 'springy' ideas can be found at this Spring Carnival!