A special space to play

To some, this may look like a corner to store toys but it is so much more than that.

This is the area of the living room that is reserved solely for the purpose of imaginary play.  It is the space where my daughter makes food, prepares lavish feasts for her family, her toys and herself.  She creates amazing dishes with different combinations of food and she makes mummy endless cups of tea.  If there are enough people in the room, the shop and cafe spring into life and a menu will be scribbled down on the chalk board.  The name of the cafe and shop changes regularly as she considers how she is feeling before grabbing the chalk and writes down her name of the day on the sign.

Back into the kitchen and she carefully puts food into the microwave and oven and always tidies away at the end, putting the plates and cups into the cupboard and the cutlery into the drawer.  She quickly checks the time on her clock before going to see how much money she has in her till at the end of a busy day. There are always decisions to make; which fruit to put into the smoothies, what filling to put in the sandwiches, what to sell in the shop, cooking in the oven or on the hob, when to do the washing up, china plates or plastic.  The possibilities are endless.

Imagination is not the only thing in action in this colourful corner of the room.  Every waitress needs to write down her orders and she does it in her smallest notebook.  Carefully, she writes down menus for us to choose from and then writes down the food that we choose.  She sometimes makes her own money with slips of paper for us all to pay with.  Along with the literacy skills, she also practices her maths.  Adding simple numbers together to come up with a total bill and counting how many things she needs for every meal, her brain is constantly on the go.  Then there is the sorting, sorting food and drink items into different categories.

So this is a lot more than a corner of the room to store things.  This is a very happy, very productive and very inspiring part of the room and proof that wooden toys such as these create endless opportunities for creative, imaginative play and also opportunities to practice and learn essential skills along the way.  No screens.  No batteries.  No limits.

This post was written in association with ASDA who sent us the gorgeous Deluxe Wooden Kitchen as part of their #WhatWoodYouPlay campaign and who have a brilliant range of great value wooden toys.  We already had the Wooden Cherry Shop Cafe which we bought ourselves last year.