Promoting Small World Play In Your Early Years Setting

Small world play offers a rich learning experience for early years children.

Similar to role play, small world activities encourage children to use their imaginations to relive day-to-day experiences or play out fantasy worlds, but with an important difference…

With role play, a child is usually acting out a specific character. In comparison, a child can take full control over everything that happens in their ‘small world’. In turn, this allows the child to control how characters interact, what they do and how everything works.

As a result, small world play encourages a wide range of skills including language and literacy, understanding of the world and working together.

How to promote small world play

There are two important keys for promoting successful small world play in your setting. These are:

1. Creating dedicated space

2. Making equipment available

Let’s explore these two aspects in more detail…

1. Dedicated space for small world play

When planning your setting, it’s important to make available different play zones for different activities.

The reason is that dedicated space allows children to focus on a single activity. This in turn helps to minimise distractions and aids concentration.

In the small world zone, large floor-based trays or spacious table tops can be ideal for creating a segregated play area.

Another idea is pack-away play mats. As well as being great space-savers, these handy resources can help give children structure when they’re building cities, developing a transportation network or creating a zoo or a farm. And whilst commercial play mats will last longer, children will love creating their own using a big roll of paper and pens/crayons.

2. Making equipment available

As well as dedicated space, children need easy access to small world toys.

Items such as people, animals, mini-beasts, dinosaurs, cars, furniture and dolls houses etc. should be made available to the children in your setting.

Sturdy classroom tidies are a great investment and can help keep the dinosaurs separate from the cars and people separate from farm animals. And when it’s time to pack away, if children know that everything has a place, these storage areas can help boost their own organisational skills.

In addition, children should be encouraged to use their imagination when creating their mini city, village or fairy-tale land. For example, children can create castles, pirate ships, space rockets and fairy tree houses from cardboard junk, yoghurt pots, toilet rolls, foil, bubble wrap and anything else that may be to hand.

In addition, items collected from the garden or the arts and crafts areas can be transformed into landscapes, clothes and other accessories to decorate and enhance a child’s make-believe world. Children can even be encouraged to draw and create their own backdrops. The possibilities are endless.

Small world play is a fun activity that can be enjoyed alone or in small groups. What’s more, this form of play can easily be continued at home and therefore is an effective way to create continuity with the setting.

Share YOUR ideas…

What are your top tips for integrating small world play with other activities in your setting? Please let us know in the comments below.