A Christmas Themed Tuff Spot Activity by Jess Perry
Sensory Play…. We Love It!
I’m Jess & I have 3 wonderful boys aged 19, 5 & 2. I have a background of working in childcare, within the baby room at a private nursery & I have also run my own messy play sessions, which have been a great success.
Our journey began around 4 years ago when I took Samuel to a messy play session run by our local Children’s Centre. I plonked him in a Tuff Tray of Halloween spaghetti & he absolutely loved it. A week later we had purchased our first tray & now here we are! Our trays have developed over the years as we have gradually built up some fantastic resources & a range of books & play cards to use alongside our activities. Some trays are quite detailed, as I absolutely love setting them up, but equally my boys have just as much fun with a simple tray of oats & diggers!
Here is my Christmas activity, featuring 3 mini activities within 1 tuff tray.
Christmas Rice – Rice is a fantastic play activity & my boys love it. Ideal for scooping & pouring or using containers for filling & emptying, children really enjoy it, it’s so much fun too! I coloured the rice green & red to represent Christmas colours. The way I prefer to do it is to add uncooked rice to a ziplock bag, add a squeeze of children’s paint & squish it around until all the rice is coloured. If you use a small amount of paint it dries really quickly. It’s also a great resource to store away in a container & reuse!! For my set up I added a selection of Lanka Kade Christmas figures, some wooden bowls & some scoops with bells next to the tray for us to enjoy singing Jingle Bells & make lots of festive sounds!
Winter Arctic Scene – For this we used a gorgeous wooden arctic set from Little Stories & some wooden snowmen from a local craft fair. For the snow I used desiccated coconut, again, great for scooping, but also the boys liked to sprinkle it over the animals like snow. Plus it smells fab!
Nativity Scene – We used some fab wooden peg dolls for this, all painted beautifully! We even have a donkey & sheep! I added some straw & a wooden stable & we recreated the story of The Nativity.
For each mini tray I added an Usborne book alongside.
The boys really enjoyed the 3 mini setups & engaged with our Christmas activity for such a long time! We had a fab afternoon!
Tuff Tray setups can be hugely detailed or super simple, all that matters is that my children have fun, enjoy the activity & hopefully learn lots through their play!
You can purchase The Little Stories Artic Set here:
https://www.little-stories.co.uk/product-page/arctic-adventure-toy-set
