Sensory spice tree with cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger
Today’s invitation to play: Little Pea’s sensory bin filled with an Autumnal playdough tree and leaves scented with cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg and complete with cinnamon sticks, leaf-shaped biscuit cutters, oak leaves, acorns, sycamore seeds and conkers.
Invitation to play accepted
Autumn has always been my favourite season. The colours of the leaves, the harvest loaf, Halloween, conkers and acorns hidden in the wet grass while sycamore seeds pilot all around you. I just love it. Even in the early Autumn, there’s something subtly different about the quality of light which is just so much nicer than the brash summer sun…
We’ve already been hitting Autumn hard by taking Little Pea for long walks in the countryside and collecting items for our Autumn season tree. On the way to one of our walks, Little Pea had fallen asleep in the car so we took a detour past the farm shop to let her nap a little bit longer and so I could fondle some mini pumpkins.
I thought the sensory appeal of a variety of veg all laid out with a range of colours, textures and scents would be something that Little Pea would enjoy too, so when she was having her morning nap today, I laid out some of the more robust vegetables from our weekly shop (and some lemons, they are the only fruit that wouldn’t go straight in her mouth…) as a farmer’s market for her to play shop with.
She loved picking up the different items, putting them in her basket and feeding them to her fox. When she didn’t recognise something (the corn and the leek were real puzzles) she would bring them to me and make her “Whada?” noise to ask what it was.
When we’d finished playing, we took one of the carrots and the lettuce out for our guinea pigs, which is always the highlight of her day. She took a bit of persuasion to relinquish the carrot though. She was delighted that the guinea pig liked it too, but didn’t want to give it up!
The other night, when Little Pea had gone to bed, I was feeling a bit frazzled and fed up. Little Pea had been really unwell with a virus which terrified me, and I’d missed a really important week at work which left me trapped in a cycle of guilt at missing work and feeling guilty for feeling that way when Little Pea was so ill… I decided that I needed something to focus on to take my mind off it, so I grabbed my craft knife, card and glue to set up an activity I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.
Peepo! By Janet and Alan Ahlberg is one of those children’s books that everyone knows. Like their other books for young children, it is beautifully illustrated, with a wonderful rhyme scheme which encourages the little reader to look for and identify objects within the illustration. The thing that makes Peepo! really special is the circular holes cut out of each page that give you a glimpse of what the baby in the book is spying and allow you to peek at more and more and more of the scene as you turn the page, until you have the whole image laid out in front you. Little Pea has found this incredibly exciting since she was very small, and her copy of Peepo! is showing signs of having been vigorously loved by a toddler.
Given how much she loved peeking through the circles in the book, I wondered what she would make of a game of peepo which used the idea of spying an image through cut out shapes with pictures of objects that she is passionate about, like the baby in Peepo! who keeps coming back to his Teddy and his ball.
Using some coloured card, a glue stick, a craft knife and some pictures, I made mini cardboard books to turn our wall into a lift-the-flap, Peepo experience. Inside the mini-books I stuck postcards of an old teddy bear and a stripey piglet, photographs of our guinea pigs and Little Pea with her Daddy and cousin, and a picture of a dog that I had cut out of a magazine. She was very curious about it as soon as she spotted it, and was excited to lift and open the flaps in various directions. When she saw the photograph of her cousin and the photograph of the guinea pigs, she giggled and tried saying their names, which was something I hadn’t heard her do before so was definitely worth the set up.
It didn’t take her too long to pull the books off the wall as they were held on with masking tape (which she’s fascinated with) and she carried them around the house with her for the rest of the day. They were a little bent by the end of it all, but I’m planning to smooth them out and bring them back out to play with new images inside in the near future.
Little Pea has started walking and it is exhausting. For me, not so much for her. She only stops running when she’s asleep, so is probably the fittest person I know.
I decided to earn myself some respite channel Little Pea’s new-found love of walking by helping her make tracks like the animals in one of her favourite stories, The Gruffalo’s Child. We have the sound book, and I always seem to accidentally lean on one of the buttons when I’m trying to sneak her into bed. But she loves it, does a wonderful snake impression and is fully on board with the lines, “Aha! Oho! A trail in the snow!” so was quite excited to be making her own footprints.
I started by sticking a large sheet of paper to the floor with masking tape so that it was secure enough for Little Pea to walk on without it slipping. In a plastic tray, I put a selection of paints, brushes and things that she could make prints with: a plastic snake, some sponges and some good old potatoes that I had carved mouse and owl footprints into.
We started after nap time by re-reading The Gruffalo’s Child while she had her snack, then hopped into some old clothes to get down to making art. At first, we walked back and forth across the paper without any paint on her feet so that she could see that there were no prints left. I then asked her to pick a colour and she chose the orange paint, which we put onto her feet with a tickly sponge. She loved looking down at her feet leaving prints on the white paper until the paint had worn off.
After that we chose an object at a time, with Little Pea selecting a colour and me saying the name and asking her about her choices until we had some red mouse paw prints, yellow owl claw prints and a green snake’s trail. As you can see, she thought it was great fun and has maybe gained a better understanding of what the Gruffalo’s child is following in her hunt for the Big Bad Mouse 🙂
Fairy Tales and Mud Pies 