Natural Rock Play Space and Outdoor Kitchen

 This post is part of a series on Playspace Design.   Other posts in the series include:
Our Playroom

Our Reading Room

Our Art Room

DIY Outdoor Sound Wall
Dinosaur Garden

This is my favorite, favorite part of our yard.  It makes me happy just being here.  There's the dappled sunlight through the overhanging trees, the gentle rustling of the native grasses - and somehow it all combines to just be perfection.  It's so hard to do a place like this justice through photos...which is why there are SO many in this post.  I really felt like it was the only way to possibly get a feel for it.

When we first looked at our house a year and a half ago, I could see so much potential inside - but the backyard was a big bummer for me.  It was sloped and had three tiers where each flat level was overgrown grass and each slope between was full of vinca or ivy.  If you were a bird looking down on the property the flat areas would make a giant overgrown grass E, if that makes sense.  Anyway, it just didn't feel very fun.  You couldn't move between the levels and the yard was just not that inviting for young children.  My mom had the vision, though.  She assured me that we could make some amazing playspaces in the yard and create ways to move between the areas of the yard more easily.  This area you see here is located at the far bottom right of the "E".  There were two beautiful boulders at the top of the lowest stretch of overgrown grass and I remember telling my mom maybe we could add some rocks here, building off those two boulders, so that the kids could climb between the flat levels?  Well --- this is what my mom created.  A magical playspace modeled after a natural dry stream bed.

S is obsessed with collecting sticks.  Every time we go on a nature walk she's carrying and collecting an assortment the whole way.  So my mom designed four of these stick holders as a sculptural element to the playspace.  S likes to bring the sticks home from all over and place/arrange them in these black PVC pipes that we've buried in the ground.

There is also a water works element to the playspace.  We have this giant metal bucket that we fill with fresh water each time we come out to play and S can use it in either of her sand pits to "cook" the food she's always busy making here, or she can pour it down her hidden pipe.  

In between two rocks there's a slotted opening that leads to a flexible underground pipe we buried when we were making the dry stream bed.  It runs from one side diagonally to the opposite side of the dry stream bed.  If you're quiet, you can hear the water as it travels under the play area.

The pipe is laid at a gradual slope, so S can walk down the path and catch the water coming out of the flexible pipe at the other end.  We have a purple Tubtrug there to catch the water as it comes out.  If S is wanting to cook at the lower sand pit, she'll often send a large quantity of water through the pipes to fill this lower bucket for easier access.

Here's another view of the main water bucket.  S is prepping some muffin tins for the sand batter.  :)  We found all the cooking supplies at our local Goodwill.

Here you can see S's lower sand pit.  We dug a very deep (around 3 feet deep) pit in the dirt and encircled it with stone pavers.  We added several 50 pound bags of play sand to fill it and we keep a garbage can lid over it when not in use to keep wild animals from using it (ew!).  You can see S's array of cooking utensils here near the lower sand pit.  On either side of S are the two orignal beautiful boulders that inspired this whole amazing space.

Here's a finished cake that S has made for the dinosaurs from our Dinosaur Garden.  Doesn't it look delicious?  :)

A view up the dry stream bed.  Once we cleared the area of all the grass and vinca, we laid/buried the pipe, rough cut out the stairs, and dug and filled the sand pits.  We then laid the largest boulders that made the steps and framed the planters.  Next we brought in large river rock and placed them sporadically, finally we filled in the remaining spaces with smaller rocks and pea gravel.  We chose native grasses of varying heights for each of five planters - the largest grasses exist on the perimeters and will grow to about 5 feet in height at maturity, eventually creating an even more private area.

A closer look at the upper sand pit from behind the upper grasses.

My mom also found this long rectangular flagstone and earmarked it for a bench/oven.  S can sit on it to eat her fantastic baked goods, or she can place the muffin tin and some of the smaller pots and pans underneath to cook them in the "oven".

Going back up the path to fetch another bowl.

The sand pits are so much fun.  We'd considered mud, but ultimately decided that sand would be easier for S to work with as mud can sometimes get a bit difficult to dig through when it's dry.

My little chef hard at work in her little sanctuary.

Well, I hope I've managed to capture a little bit of the perfection and peace that exists in our amazing dry stream bed play space.  We are so thankful to my mom who had this incredible vision and brought it to life!  I still can't believe this used to be a snarl of grass and vinca...

Sometime next week I will try to post the remaining elements of our backyard so you can see how everything works together!

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Simple Small Worlds: Farm World

You can read about our other Simple Small Worlds here:

Fizzing Hidden Ocean World

Froggy World

Insect World

Dinosaurs and Sticky Mud

Dragon World

Butterfly World

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.

S has a lot of miniature farm animals (some from miscellaneous Playmobil sets;some from a partial Safari Ltd Farm TOOBI found at a garage sale), so making a farm small world seemed only natural!

First I set to work making stalls for the animals.  These was quickly accomplished with my best friend, hot glue gun, and some popsicle sticks.

Next I needed fill materials.  I try to keep the materials in my small worlds as simple as possible, so I went with some blue cardstock paper for the pond, some gravel for the edge of the pond, some millet puff cereal we had for the horses' stall, dried coffee grounds for the pig stall, cut up dried grass from our front yard, and cut up fresh grass from our backyard.

S really enjoyed the smell of the cut grass, and as this was several weeks ago when it was still winter, it really helped our house smell a bit like summer (fresh cut grass always reminds me of summer!).

S decided to play with tiny pony first.  He took a drink from the pond first.

Then went to visit the pigs.

Finally he came back to his stall and ate some apples with the rest of his horse family.

Then S decided that everyone was tired and needed her to create beds for them throughout the world.

The beds were each individually made by S.  They consisted of a little bit of everything...

Now little pig is asleep and she's off making another bed.

She really wanted to feel the "dirt" with her foot.  :)

After each bed was carefully made, S took all the fencing and the pond, requested a piece of plastic wrap, and made this.  It's a big house with a "clear window" for Mama Pig.  S then proceeded to tell several stories about Mama Pig and how she got to her home.  Small worlds are a fabulous venue for encouraging story telling.  This bin stayed around for several days, and my husband and I enjoyed several versions of Mama Pig stories while X really enjoyed playing with the dried grass.  :)

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Simple Small Worlds: Insect World

You can read about our other Simple Small Worlds here:

Fizzing Hidden Ocean World

Froggy World

Farm World

Dinosaurs and Sticky Mud

Dragon World

Butterfly World

We are once again so excited to be reviewing another Safari Ltd product!  Today we're playing with another one of their brilliant TOOBS - the Insect TOOB.  Safari Ltd provided me with their Insect TOOB free of charge, but all opinions expressed in this post are my own and were not influenced by the free product.

One of the things that S and I find super fascinating about insects is their ability to walk on walls!  It's always so impressive to watch them scale the walls of whatever container we've placed them in for observation - so I wanted to bring that element into this small world.  To that end, I cut strips of contact paper and lined the inside walls of the world with it.  I flipped each strip sticky side up and used scotch tape along the edges to keep it in place.  It really added a cool element to the small world, I think.  (A roll of contact paper is around $5 and you can read about some other ways that we've played with it here, here, and here.)

Insects are everywhere, in all sorts of different environments, so this is a great small world to make with  gathered natural materials from the yard/surrounding areas of your house.  Whether you live in a forest like us, or near a beach, or in a big city, a rural area, or a desert - any of the materials you find outside are things that make up your insects' environment!

For the materials in the bin, I took a walk around the perimeter of our house and gathered interesting supplies.  I clipped a branch off one of our Western Red Cedar trees, grabbed some cool looking large stones, and a patch of moss.  

Though you can absolutely use dirt from outside (or grass or whatever other material!), I like to "recycle" our old coffee grinds into "dirt" because I feel like the grounds are less messy and look prettier than real dirt.  My system for accumulating used coffee grounds is to lay the wet grounds flat on a sheet pan and let them air dry for 24 hours.  From there I transfer them to an open Gladware container.  You could also dry them in the oven on very low heat if you wanted to be faster about it.  You'll see me use our coffee ground dirt in other posts (I just haven't written them up yet).  It also doesn't hurt that they smell faintly of coffee.  Yum.

I also grabbed some smaller polished stones that I'd bought a bag of (I think at the Dollar Store?) and keep in a container for sensory play to add some more detail to the world.

S really enjoyed the sticky walls and had lots of fun sticking and unsticking the various bugs. 

I liked the different textural elements in the world - hard stones, scaly tree branch, gritty coffee ground dirt, and soft moss.

Here caterpillar is going for a little walk.  He's thinking he might want to climb the wall!

There he goes!  We love that Safari Ltd miniatures are perfectly sized for little hands.

The colors are so vibrant and the models are so realistic.  This is the only way I'd let S touch a centipede!  In real life those suckers are mean!!!!  

S enjoyed taking all the little bugs on a tour of their environment.

After taking turns with most of the insects, she decided that centipede was her favorite (probably because she isn't allowed to hold the real creatures).

Here she's having a heart-to-heart with centipede about reforming his aggressive biting ways (did you know that a real centipede bite is rumored to be comparable to a bee sting?  Ouch!).  She told me he'd decided to be nice to her and his other insect friends and was not going to bite!  She played with him for around an hour.  And I'm happy to report that, true to his word, he did not bite her.  ;)

S was so enamored with the two butterflies that came in the Insect TOOB that they'd (earlier) flown away to another area of our house and we almost forgot to include them in our photo shoot!  So we decided they would make a quick visit to insect world before Mama put away her camera.  Here they're sunning themselves on the rocks.  With such vibrantly colored wings, it's no wonder S spirited them away!

The cohesive groups of creatures presented in Safari Ltd TOOBS always inspire me to incorporate books with our small world play.  Here's S investigating a book from our insect book round-up.  :)

Disclosure:  As I mentioned above, Safari Ltd did provide the Insect TOOB to us free of charge.  I was not paid for this post.  All opinions are my own; I am not swayed by compensation.  I only review products that are relevant to my blog and that I feel my readers would be interested in learning about.

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.