both before and after our recent annual trip to a farm park. The children got lots of play from this in reliving the day’s events from the tractor ride through to seeing and feeding the animals.


In the past we have extended their small world play into creativity and role play by building life size items to enhance their play i.e. a cardboard box pirate ship, dressing up and dinosaur footprints passing through pre-school.


In the past few years, we seem to have more and more children who come to us at the age of two years and are slightly delayed in their speech and language. We find that small world allows them to narrate their own story and those who feel shy to talk to us become more confident in their independent play. When engrossed we get a better understanding of what level their vocabulary is at.


We love to see them acting out the day to day scenarios they live through, making sense of situations and as practitioners it is our role to know when to sit back and observe and when to become


involved. Watching and listening to the children is often when we have captured some of the best observations of the children’s development, small world really lends itself to this.


When we are aware of experiences that children are going through e.g. a little girl who has regular hospital visits, we amend our planning to include those resources for her with the hospital, doctors, nurses and patients.


We like to provide as many natural resources as possible, items collected from the park or the beach: shells, seaweed and driftwood so that the children can build these into their play and create their own small world scenes, leading the way with their play and ideas.


Small world gives huge benefits to the children with a whole world of possibilities, excitement, learning and play. They can invent and discover and escape to an abstract world where they tell the story and who wouldn’t want to do that!


“Small world gives huge benefits to the children with a whole world of possibilities, excitement, learning and play.”


Shop Little Learners ypo.co.uk/earlyyears


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