Construction Site Tuff Tray

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Today I’m bringing you another really easy Tuff Tray* idea with things you might have laying around the house and garden. I don’t like to spend loads of money on new items or complicated set ups so I always like to use things we already have to hand. This is how we put together a simple Construction Site Tuff Tray.

What you’ll need:

Construction vehicles*
Construction signs
Black paper and white chalk (for the road)
Building materials (we used mud, grass, cornflakes, red lentils, rice crispies, sand and small stones)

On the morning I set up this Tuff Tray I hadn’t planned it at all so I really did throw it together with things I could find at home. I started by cutting some strips of black card for the roads and sellotaped them to the Tuff Tray. After setting out 4 different sections I added materials such as soil and grass, sand, small rocks (left over from gardening) and some different cereals and some red lentils. Erin has loads of construction type toys and accessories like signs so I grabbed a load of those too.

Once Erin saw me putting all of this together she really wanted to help. She was great at going to collect toys for me and handing me the different materials when I needed them. It was quite hard to keep the whole set up ‘nice’ while she was helping but we sort of managed it before I let her loose with playing!

Erin was really interested in each section, finding out what each of the different materials was and what she could do with them. Erin used the construction vehicles to move the materials around the Tuff Tray and to build up different piles. We have some little worker looking toys so she spent quite a bit of time moving these around and making sure there was someone looking after each area of the construction site.

This was a really great Tuff Tray for Erin as not only was she able to help set it up, making her involved from the start, but it was something she could play on her own if she wanted to. I of course supervised and helped her with a few ideas to begin with but after that Erin was quite happy to come up with different situations, like there being spillages on the road that needed cleaning. This one was really great for her imagination!