Monday, October 29, 2012

The best invitations to play are the simplest

I slept in on Friday morning, as it was a public holiday. The girls woke up before me and cuddled right in. We had had grand plans for a day out, but in the end, I was scrambling to put lunch and breakfast together while the children played.

To make sure that they weren't dying of hunger while I put pancakes together for breakfast, I put the blocks and the animals in the kitchen. THe kids ignored it someewhat - husband was chasing Anjali to play piano and put on her eye drops, and then they did some costumes and reading and by the time they were done, the breakfast was ready. So they didnt really look at this properly until after breakfast.

Then they started building enclosures for the Hippo and Giraffe. Let me clarify a little. Sophia first started making the enclosures. She walled up the animals with her 3.5 year old skills and built tight walls around them. Then Anjali came in.

"You cant keep animals in such small enclosures. It is cruel and they need space to move!" So the animal rights activist built complete enclosures for the hippo.

This one has a lake, some grass, a seashell with water and a pile of brown seeds, which alternated between hippo food and hippo poo in different versions of the play. 

I was reorganizing the sensory items box (the old cardboard box was all torn and worn so I was shifting the seeds and shells into a new container. They had free rein of the sensory stuff when this was happening. )

The Giraffe enclosure was a equally sophisticated, with sand at the bottom, a tree, a water container and the pellets combination.
See this peanut butter jar over here. It contained marbles which my very business minded kid took out. She is intending to start a naturopathy business, i think. She filled the bottle with Giraffe Pee (thankfully its the kind that comes out of the tap). Then she went around telling everyone that Giraffe pee is good for cough and you have to mix it with a bit of milk.  
She didnt stop there. They had a zoo sale
Of Giraffe pee sold in bottles.
The snake oil salesman on the family put together packages. You had to buy a bottle with a bunch of other random stuff. But you could only buy them as a package and not as individual items. If that makes any sense. See the milk over there, we were actually mixing the cough syrup milk composition and giving it to everyone in the house.

Anyway, that was over an hour of play which encompassed a lot of skills - construction, animal rights, pretend play, business acumen, potion making, fine motor skills etc.


Little Wonders' Days

2 comments:

  1. Wow, some busy kids you have there, fabulous! Mich x

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, what a fun day with your kids!! Thank you for sharing at Happy Family Times!

    ReplyDelete

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