crazy about fairy house building

I love building fairy houses with the kids and love seeing how much they get out of it. I really wanted to share this with other kids and parents and decided to approach my preschool to see if they were interested in holding a fairy house building event.

The school loved the idea and ran with it, making it a focus for the following week. They began talking about it with the kids the week before and getting them to do little activities. They started by brainstorming and discussing ideas for the fairy, gnome and elf house project with the children and had the kids look through various books which had natural outside materials in them. They then went on a hunt outside to find some natural materials, which could be used to build their houses. The kids then did some drawing plans of what they would like their house to look like. We decided to get parents to bring in some natural building materials and I also took in some extras to kick it off.

The kids and parents loved it - with everyone participating and bringing in loads of things to build with. Fairy, gnome, elf houses soon turned into mansions, cities with ponds, pebbled paths, magical fairy flower lights, soft petal beds for a fairy to rest in, shells used as plates for a fairy to eat from and seed pods used for sipping fairy tea.

Ever since they had this at Myles' school, he has gone fairy house building crazy, collecting things constantly to take home to build a house. I love the way this activity gets him using his imagination but he also gets to learn about the things he is using to build the houses with - like the texture of different barks, types of seed pods, shells, types of flowers etc....

A VISIT FROM THE FAIRIES

After being inspired by the images from this book, Myles and I went for a wander around the neighbourhood, basket underarm, shoes off, dodging the summer time bindi's and did some collecting. We gathered bark, leaves, gumnuts, rocks, pebbles, palm fronds and seed pods, brought them back home and began constructing what was initially, 'the fairy' house but inevitably became (after some convincing that its wasn't Spiderman's house) the fairies/knights/goblins house. Doing this little activity didn't take long and I felt like both of us for a moment, although brief (in my perception of time) entered into a magical world where macadamia nut shells propped on sticks lite the way to the house for visitors that only came out at night and the little red mushrooms would provide shelter for baby goblins or a landing spot for incoming fairies. We knew the next morning that the fairies/goblins had visited that night from the amount of fairy dust (hundreds of thousands) left behind.