Animal tuff tray sparks young children's imagination

Encouraging the children in Toddler Room to develop their imagination skills

After observing the children in Toddler Room as they chose to play with the animals when self-resourcing during choosing time, two of the practitioners decided to set up an inviting jungle animals play mat for the children to explore.

Artificial grass was placed on the floor as a play mat and a variety of resources were added to encourage the children to develop their play, before adding the jungle animals to their new home. The children couldn't wait to explore, sitting patiently around the activity until it was set up and ready for them to engage in. The animals new habitat consisted of sticks, wooden logs, pine cones, a wooden hut, a wooden weaved teepee, wooden numbers and a spinning, adjustable wooden tree.

One child decided to place the zebra that he was playing with inside the wooden weaved teepee, telling his friends; "He sleepy! Going to bed. In bed." His friends copied, soon telling each other how their animals were tired and needed to go to bed. This inspired one of the practitioners to add a piece of brown material, prompting the children to use it as the animals' blanket. The children were eager to use it in their play, placing it over the animals as they lay them down in the hut for a sleep. One child placed the elephant into the wooden hut, gave the animal a goodnight kiss and said "Night, night" as they put him inside.

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Once the animals had awoken, the children announced that they were hungry. One child began feeding the cheetah the pine cone, putting it towards it's mouth. He then snapped a little bit off and began feeding it to the cheetah, making noises as it ate it's dinner; "Nom, nom, nom".

After a nice nap and a tasty lunch, the children decided that it was time for the animals to play. This inspired one child to put the wooden blocks aside each other, pretending that the animal was walking, jumping and running across the wooden blocks, exploring it's new habitat. One lion even jumped from one of the wooden stumps to another, roaring as it travelled through the air!

The children concluded their play, placing the animals back to sleep. After a lot of fun exploring it's new habitat, the tiger was placed inside the wooden coconut shell to sleep. They then added another wooden coconut shell on top of this one to make a cosy house for the animal to sleep in.

After observing how much the children enjoyed this activity, the practitioners decided to extend the activity further by setting up a jungle small-world tuff tray using food to encourage the children to feed the animals and elaborate on their imagination skills.