6 Ways to Play with Reel Wood Planets

Hi I’m Kim, one of the makers at Reel Wood and mummy to Evie who is 4 and Eli who will be 2 next month. Our toys are designed mainly with our children’s interests in mind and they are truly our number one fans! Reel Wood toys are out every day in our house and the children love showing me new and different ways that they like to play with them.

The Planets are some of the most played with toys by Evie. She is in love with all things space so when I asked if she wanted to show some other children how she plays with her planets she jumped at the chance.

Children have such a wonderful imagination and we love encouraging their creativity here. So one of Evie’s favourite things to do is to draw around the Reel Wood Planets and create her own alien planet, designing different surfaces and exploring different colours. She often creates little stories about the type of people that live there and what they do for jobs.

Early years space activities

One of the obvious things to do with the planets is to use them as a learning resource to explore the planets in our solar system. We have recently been pairing ours with the new Solar System Art Print to help solidify the names of the planets, their order and to be able to recognise them easily.

We also incorporate our Reel Wood letters to spell out the names of each planet. We use this time to cement our phonics skills that we have been working on by sounding out each letter and work on blending them to be able to read the word.

Ideas to learn planets for kids

We love using play dough, it’s such a fantastic versatile resource. For this exercise we flattened our Okonorm Play Dough out and pressed our planet into it. The Planets are deeply engraved with different patterns so they create different imprints into play dough adding an extra sensory element.
Eli especially loves feeling the patterns in the planets and play dough.

You can use this time to talk about how they feel and get your children to work on describing things. It also presents the opportunity to discuss the unique characteristics that each of the planets have.

Sensory play ideas

Sorting the planets in different ways is something Evie enjoys doing. Here we focused on size order introducing some early math skills and language. You could also order the planets alphabetically or even how they appear in the Solar System.

Solar system for children

One of my favourite childhood memories is going to the museum with my Grandma and being given a piece of paper, a pencil and different fossils to rub over.

So we do this with a lot of things in our house that have different textures and our Reel Wood Planets are no exception to this. We used the Okonorm Wax Blocks, placed the planet underneath a piece of paper and coloured over the pattern. This allowed us to explore different colours, talk about textures, work on pencil grip, and explore the different planets characteristics in another way.

Creative solar system games for kids

This is always a fun way to play with the planets and creates a challenge for all the family. Eli enjoys stacking the planets on their faces and creating piles allowing him to develop his hand-eye coordination and build on his cognitive development skills.

Evie enjoys the challenge of trying to get each planet to balance on top of each other which is pretty difficult considering they’re mainly round! Even myself and Joni find ourselves joining in and getting quite competitive with this one! Whilst doing it we are able to have a conversation about the forces in motion and how this affects things in the wider world.

Learning about space through play

Thanks to Kim from Reel Wood (@natural_urban_mummy) for taking the time to round up some of the great ways to play with the Planets!

Shop Reel Wood Planets  >> HERE <<