Frozen Lake Small World Play

We’re having a real lack of wintry weather at the moment, but I really want J and T to experience what it’s like so I set up a Frozen Lake Small World Play for J and T this week. It was really easy to make and they enjoyed touching the ice, and playing with it – Just one warning that blue food dye does colour hands!

I’ve never done any small world play with then but have recently noticed that J is moving his characters around and pretending that they are saying things and doing things around the time and what has surprised me is that T is copying what he does.

What you need

A tin lid
Water
Blue Food Colouring (this was J’s suggestion and is not really required but water is blue!)
Freezer
Some Characters and scenery – ours were characters from In The Night Garden that we had got free with magazines and some of our craft bits and pieces.

We added it to our Snow (Cloud) Dough box from last week for added Frozen/Winter play.

How the fun happens

As you can see I used a lid of a Christmas chocolate tin and filled it with water and blue food colouring and then froze it this morning. This afternoon after Nap time I got it out and first J and T touched the ice with “OHHHHHHHHHHHH” and “COLD” being the two most heard words.

I got out our Snow (Cloud) Dough box and added the frozen lake to the box, dug out some characters from the toy box (these could be anything but we’re not into characters like Lego or Playmobile yet and the free ones that came with magazines are the only characters that we have – but was really helped by the fact that our magazine last week was all about Ice and Snow).

T was around and came over to investigate what was going on and saw J snowing on the lake with some of the snow dough and started to copy. It was interesting to watch them puzzle over the ice starting to melt (luckily it was contained within the box but I do now have to replenish our snow dough as some of it got a little wet which doesn’t work very well) and getting their hands covered in blue food dye.