This is the first post in a new weekly feature on Edspire.

Tales from the Tuff Spot is going to be a Monday night post about a messy or sensory play activity linked to a story, rhyme or song. Or perhaps a mixture of all three.

There will be a theme.

Today the theme is farms.

Thanks to all the lovely bloggers, friends and family that contributed to Matilda Mae’s Star Fund we have an annual pass to The Rare Breeds Centre in Kent. We go there every week. To see the animals and to ride on the tractor.

Esther and William love spending time at The Farm!

This weekend before our farm visit we read lots of farm story books before embarking on some messy, sensory small world play all set on a Tuff Spot farm.

We live in a tiny village surrounded by farms and so we see lots of tractors and trailers every day. Esther and William are huge fans of big machines!

For this activity I used two Tuff Spots. My original idea was to create an industrial, crop type of farm on one Spot and a country, animal farm on the other but in the end we had a mix of the two on each.

With tea on Friday night we read some of our favourite farm stories to help us with ideas as to what we might find on a farm.

Esther and William were very keen for there to be a barn, a farmhouse, a pigsty, a pond and lots of farm animals.

They also wanted tractors and dumper trucks.

Their wish was, of course, my command!

To create the farms I used

Porridge oats and croutons to create a dusty farm floor with animal feed
Uncooked spaghetti for straw and hay
A silver foil platter for a pond
A Big Jigs Farm House Shape Sorter for a barn
Playmobil fences and trees
A HappyLand farmhouse
A range of plastic and wooden animals
Small cake tins for animal feed trays that once empty became garages for vehicles
Tractors, trailers and dumper trucks
Red lentils and lots of dried pulses and beans
Farmyard flashcards from Twinkl Resources

This was a mega messy play session and took some planning and setting up but it was so so so worth it.

We played with it for hours and because the ingredients are dry I have been able to keep them, those that were not eaten(!) to reuse in a different small world play.

I set out the farm and invited Esther and William to come and play.

Thankfully they immediately recognised that I had created a farm and they were keen to get on and play.

They wanted to get on and touch the pulses and beans. These things were new to them and they loved picking them up and letting them run through their fingers. They talked about the different feel and the different colours. They loaded and unloaded dumper trucks and trailers.

To begin with I just enjoyed watching them play freely without any direction or questioning from me.

As time went on Esther started to notice the flashcards and the Big Jigs animals with words on the back. She was very pleased with herself that she knew what the words said, because of the shape or the pictures. We have started some work on letters and sounds and she can recognise b,e,w,p,h,t and some others, mostly those that are the start on an engine name in Thomas!! Both Esther and William know the letters from Thomas.

As Esther started looking around at the animals she decided that she might like to feed some of them. She saw that the spaghetti was like hay and fed it to the horses. She put a big pile of spaghetti hay in the middle of the farm and moved all the horses to it.

Esther also enjoyed loading up her dumper truck with different food stuffs and driving them round the farm to the different animals.

Both Esther and William loved pouring and scooping and moving the pulses and beans and porridge oats around. They poured them over animals, scooped them up into piles, packed them into trucks and scattered them around the farm.

They loved exploring the colours, the textures, the tastes and the smells of today’s play.

They also loved making up stories with the different animals. I extended this part of their play by moving the characters into different situations. Such as a Granny standing near the horses’ paddock as though she might be about to feed them apples. The farmer standing by the pigsty perhaps about to muck out the pen. The sheep dog by the sheep enclosure perhaps counting in the sheep. We used our farm visits and farm stories to help us act out different things.

Esther, in particular, also brought in other life events and stories. She talked about rolling around like Bottomley Potts from the Hairy Maclarey stories and she made birthday cakes with spaghetti candles in the back of her dumper truck and insisted that we all sing the song. This led us on to then singing Old MacDonald and I Went To Visit A Farm Today and making all the different animal noises that we had on our play farm. We had such a lovely time together.
Such whole hearted family fun.

After a good while Esther and William could stand it no more. They had to get into the Tuff Spot themselves and really interact with the farm with every bit of their being.

They sat in among the animals and really started to interact with all the materials and accessories.

They loved the crunchy popping sounds of the spaghetti and oats beneath their feet and the spiky texture between their toes. They loved talking to the animals and moving the vehicles around. They were both so independently busy but in a calm and quite way. It was lovely.

It was also a privilege to listen to their growing understanding of concepts such as more or less, full or empty, big or small. They are learning so so much through our messy and sensory play.

Esther and William’s play is quite predictable. Not long after they have physically immersed themselves into their messy or sensory play they ask for their engines and the trains are introduced to play.

Today this was very emotional for me as William gave his engines a tour of the farmyard, introducing Emily to all the engines and then giving her lots of hay to eat and hay bales (croutons). He talks to her as though his heart is full of love for her which I am most certain it is. In my emotional state watching my son tenderly care for his engines is enough to make me cry. He really is a very sweet and gentle soul. Most of the time!

Please excuse the chat about wee at the end of this video!!

At the end of our play we returned to our books and to our singing. We love singing together and have a whole repertoire of farm songs including

Six Little Ducks
Five Little Ducks Went Swimming One Day
Dingle Dangle Scarecrow
The Farmer in the Den
Old MacDonald
I Went To Visit a Farm One Day
Baa Baa Black Sheep
This Little Piggy
Chick Chick Chick Chick Chicken

Our favourite farm books are

What The Ladybird Heard
Farmer Duck
Click Clack Moo Cows That Type
Rip and Rap
The Noisy Farm
The Noisy Tractor
The Little Red Hen
Chicken Licken
The Three Little Pigs
Rosie’s Walk

I hope that you have enjoyed this first Tale from the Tuff Spot. I am looking forward to creating many more. I hope that you will join me. For funny moments much like this x