A Nature Craft Play Space will keep your kids occupied with good old fashioned fun for hours and hours.

And don’t we just love seeing our children occupied, getting creative with natural materials and having fun!?

Once it’s set up, you’ll feel incredible, your kids will be kept busy and you’ll only need to look around the backyard to stock up many of the materials when they’ve run out.

Better yet, you can get the kids to do that too. It’s such a winner!

Set up your nature craft play space

If your kids are old enough, set the nature craft play space up in an area that they can access when ever they like. It will lead to so much more investigation and self-led crafting and it’s a lovely way to get them outside without any pushing at all.

Kids gravitate to a space that has lots of loose items and that’s the first thing you’ll need.

Materials from nature

An old bookshelf is make a perfect nature craft play space. It sorts the materials into sections and your children are able to see everything they have access to at once.

The top shelf of our nature craft play space case holds our materials from nature. Some I’ve bought, but most I’ve scavenged along the way. What you have in here will depend on where you’ve been and what’s seasonally available.

Like I’ve mentioned before, it’s important to be mindful of the environment whilst collecting natural materials from nature.

What material to add to your nature craft play space:

• rocks
• sand
• shells
• gumnuts
• seedpods
• feathers
• old wasp nests
• grasses
• leaves
• sticks
• flowers
• nature’s glitter
• bark
• herbs
• dirt
• pine cones

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Nature is more versatile than you think. Take a look at how you can replace common craft materials with nature.

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Natural Accessories

The next items to collect for your nature craft play space are natural materials that add value to the crafting process. These products may help children to construct items with their collections from nature, add layers of texture to crafts or may be used in sensory play.

Fill a basket with:

• yarn/wool
• String
• twine
• brown paper
• wooden products
• straw
• old playdough
  

We also display our nature weaving frames and mini wood slice weaving frames too. Both are used  by the kids to weave nature, yarn or straw.

Discovery Accessories

There’s a number of accessories I’ve added to the nature craft space to encourage the investigation of natural products. Think of adding the following items to encourage curiosity:

• mirror
• magnifying glasses
• basket to collect more nature
• tweezers
• Bug collector

Craft Accessories

You’ll also need to add a basket filled with the items that you’d regularly use in crafting:

• art products (like pastels, chalk, pencils, pens)
• pegs
• paper clips
• stick tape
• glue sticks
• hole punches
• scissors

Nature craft play space Safety

I’d also suggest you have container that holds items you don’t want your children to use yet or items that might require your full supervision.

Examples include:

• glue gun
• expensive craft glue
• craft materials I’m saving for later ( I have the most divine sand filled with little shells I don’t want the girls to use right now)
• paint

We adore our nature craft play space. We are constantly getting low on items but that’s okay with me because that means they’re using it — a lot!  There’s always something beautiful from nature to add to any empty container.

Is there anything you would add that I may have missed?