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Houses in All Sizes

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Teach your child about different kinds of houses and building materials while building a Fairy House for your garden.

At OMO, we believe that every stain represents an important experience - mud stains are the stamp of adventure, grass stains are the sign of exploration and fruit stains are the aftermath of discovery. Encourage your kids to get messy with our fun activities for happy, healthy, confident kids. We'll be there to sort out the dirty clothes afterwards.

Houses in All Sizes

Teach your child about different kinds of houses and building materials while building a Fairy House for your garden.

What you’ll need:

What you will need

What to do:

This activity takes two or more days as you will first make the ‘bricks’ and then leave them to dry before building the house. First make your mud mixture. Your child can do this, or you can prepare the mixture for them. Add a scoop of mud to the bowl, then a scoop of water and mix them together with your hands. Add a handful of straw or grass clippings to help it all bind together. Keep adding mud, water and straw until you have a good mixture that holds together well when you form it into a ball.

Get your child to pack the mud into the moulds. A big ice tray is perfect to make brick shapes. Make enough bricks to build a small ‘fairy house’ about the size of a shoebox. Set your mud mould aside in a sunny, dry spot for at least 24 hours to dry.

When your bricks have dried out, it’s time to build a fairy house. Choose a sheltered place in your garden. Prepare a bowl of fresh, runny mud. Gently remove the bricks from the mould and help your child to lay out the bricks in a square. Don’t forget to leave a doorway! Add more layers of bricks, with mud as a mortar, to build walls. Use sticks across the open doorway space so that you can carry on the brick layer above the doorway. When you have built up the walls around the four sides of the house, it’s time to put on a roof. Show your child how to place sticks across the tops of the walls and then lay large leaves on top of the sticks to make a roof. The garden house is now all ready for the fairies to move in…

While you’re doing this activity, you can talk to your child about the different types of houses that people live in, and the different materials houses are made of. Ask them to talk about some of the houses they have visited or seen.

Alternative Materials:

Alternative materials

Change it up:

Make it easy: Build a sandcastle house or make basic mud walls with your child.

Make it a challenge: Let your child take charge of the brickmaking and the house design. Show them how to make a lintel out of a stick for the doorway and challenge them to make a window space using the same technique.

Play with friends: A group of friends can work together to build a house, or some can build a house while others design and build a garden or make furniture out of natural materials.

Indoor play: You can make an indoor fairy house using air drying clay to make the bricks or make ‘quick’ bricks using playdough.

Developmental areas:

  • Fine motor skills

  • Concepts – shelter

  • Problem solving

Values: 

Respect; empathy; teamwork.