Little Explorers: Fairy Houses

Give children a prompt for their imagination, and a ‘useful job’ to do, and you’ll keep them busy for hours. Here’s a fun activity which involves searching, collecting, building, and miniature interior decoration!

This can be done anywhere, it just requires a sprinkle of imagination. Tell your Little Explorers you’ve heard that the fairies are running out of houses and they need their help. Ask them to find a perfect, hidden spot for the build. Perhaps the mossy base of a tree, in the corner of the garden, or a rocky cove on the beach. Then set them off collecting building materials. Keep it natural - no fairy likes their house to be full of rubbish or made with glue! Twigs, stones, pine cones, sand, shells, leaves, wool tufts, cotton, feathers, bark and flowers all come in handy.

Create your house from the floor up. Ask your children if the fairies would prefer a pressed mud floor, or maybe sand? Are the walls going to be made from layers of twigs, or bark? Is it a tall house or a round one? How about the roof - should it be made from leaves or dried grass? And how about a few acorn tops for bowls or stones for tables? We took miniature clay chairs and tiny bowls we made a few days earlier. Flowers will most definitely be needed for decorations!

We genuinely found a real fairy boot in the woods! Our Little Explorers insisted we leave it there so no fairy was left hobbling around with only one shoe on. But it’s an idea to take a prop - perhaps a dolls’ house chair, to ‘find’. This will set their imaginations off and start the magic. Once they believe it’s true even the grumpiest little sceptic will stop whacking a tree with a stick and want to get involved. And it’s worth noting that elves live in these houses too if the boys aren’t feeling the appeal.

Expert explorers: Even though we often think of fairies as being beautiful and kind creatures, they have a much worse reputation in folklore. They were originally thought to be malicious sprites we had to be protected from. Now we imagine them to look like miniature humans with wings, but at first they were seen as either tall luminous beings or shrunken, wizened trolls.

We would love to see pictures of the fairy houses your Little Explorers have created!