Whether it's travel, food, lifestyle or just a healthy dose of parenting reality, there's something for everyone here. Esther also enjoyed loading up her dumper truck with different food stuffs and driving them round the farm to the different animals. I blog about living with grief after child loss, crafts, days out and the little moments of family life. This is one of my favourite trays I’ve done so far, just because of the message it teaches children.

Etsy’s 100% renewable electricity commitment includes the electricity used by the data centres that host Etsy.The Tuff Tray Mats are colourfast and waterproof and so you can add water, toys, sand, pebbles and leaves to create interesting small environments and wipe the mat and tray down afterwards to play afresh the next day! Once this was all set up and put into place I then added toys that I already had in our home such as animals, Happyland people, a fire engine, and other little bits. We tried scooping the nectar and filling the inside of our Grimms mini rainbow, which served as our honeycomb. Walking on the Line is a fun and educational activity for all kids, whether you’re following the Montessori style of parenting and teaching or not.

I added an activity to the tray to keep my youngest busy as I thought this may be a bit old for her. Both were perfect textures for mark-making and the loose parts gave this tray an extra layer for play.

Treat your baby or toddler with a trip to a sensory farm — this busy tray has so many different textures for them to explore. I used a range of nature items including bark, grass, flowers, twigs and pine cones to help bring this tray alive. This edible farmyard activity is one of a set of 20 ideas that you will find in our farm theme toddler plans!

This was a mega messy play session and took some planning and setting up but it was so so so worth it. I’d quite like to try filling the tuff tray with oobleck next time so Sophie can try jumping and standing on it. My little girl LOVES this book and I thought about how I could extend storytime with some extra props.

To enable personalised advertising (like interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. We used toys and props that we already had either in the toy or food cupboards making it really easy to replicate. You can be as creative and imaginative as you like when creating the tray play and adjust the activity to suit the age of your little ones. I used paper mache along with newspaper and cardboard to create the Volcano and then once it was dry I painted it.

We are trying to avoid too much screen time here, but need to keep a 3 year old and a 9 month old happy. Use the ideas in this resource to create a magical fairy garden busy tray for your baby or toddler to explore. I rolled a long green sausage out of play dough, squashed it flat and made lots of line indents all the way along. This not only tells the story of a hungry Caterpillar but it also shows the life cycle of a Caterpillar and through my daughter having the props she could see more clearly that life cycle. Georgia also gave me a funny look recently when we moved her baby brother from formula and I said he can now have “cows milk”.I piled the black dyed sugar cubes, black beans, wooden blocks and white stones in piles for Harry to use his diggers to move around. Finally, for the fruit picking I made a 3d tree model to stick the fruit onto – I use these sticky dots a lot for things like this. They then set about playing – they used some empty fruit boxes to collect the vegetables, dairy produce and fruit. I used plastic shrub plants from Harry’s Schleich watering hole and laid them across the top of the soil on the green Play-Doh and between the rocks.