Child-led/Loose Parts Play - Ollie's Fairy & Dragon World

My kids love it when I organise a directed activity for them but they are really great at creating their own ideas too. Ollie decided entirely independently that he wanted to create a fairy & dragon world for Phoebe in the holidays. We had a couple of free days this week so he set to work with his plans!

He asked for some cardboard boxes and some of my wooden peg dolls to make fairies. I gave him the peg dolls & a pile of various cardboard and left him to it. He had great fun creating a dragon poster, fairy houses & fairies.

My favourite creation of his was the fairy helter skelter!

He also created various activities for us all to do including a dragon egg hunt & a fairy tree each to decorate.

We've done the rainbow experiment before - add warm water to a circle of Skittles and watch the rainbow appear! - but Ollie wanted to make his own version of it.

He told Phoebe that they were making dragon medicine - the coloured pills were poisonous to dragons so they needed to remove the colour. They dropped the 'pills' into the warm water colour by colour with lots of great conversation about what was happening to the Skittles & the water. Unfortunately the dragons didn't get their medicine as the children discovered that the sweets still taste delicious without the colour!

They then tried doing a line of Skittles with a tiny bit of water instead of covering them in it. It didn't produce the impressive results that the circle does but it was great to see them coming up with their own ideas and using scientific language to discuss what they thought would happen compared to what actually did happen.

Ollie loved taking the lead & organising his own theme. Phoebe has now decided that she's going to organise a Harry Potter world for Ollie in return - watch this space!!