Small world play occurs when children use miniature items such as toys, found objects, or replicas to act out scenes or ideas from real life, stories, or books.

Small worlds often include sensory elements which add even more depth to the experience and create more opportunities for language stimulation.

For this activity, we created castles out of styrofoam, and then used these castles to act out scenes from Jack and the Beanstalk.

Each castle came with jewels (to symbolize treasure), a plastic toy giant, a plastic toy Jack, and cotton to represent clouds. This activity was open-ended, which means that your little ones were given the freedom to explore and add their own twist to the plot of the story!