In the Night Garden

My son is a huge fan of ‘In the Night Garden’ so this activity enabled my son to bring the story and the characters to life by him creating his own version of the story.

So I wanted to recreate the boat scene and the garden scene from In the Night Garden. The characters, the green and blue material and electric tea lights were all from Amazon. The plastic plants are meant for an aquarium and I had bought these from Pets at Home. The clear and blue glass pebbles were borrowed vase decorations from my sister. The rest of the pieces were from our Duplo collection. I put a empty weetabix box under the back of the green material to create a hill and make it a little more interesting.

To create a multi-sensory experience I played the music from ‘In the Night Garden’ on Spotify.

My son was awe-struck with the scene I had created. He spent the first 5 minutes just looking and touching everything.

I then played the opening music from ‘In the Night Garden’ and my little one immediately went over to Iggle Piggle and took him in and out of the boat. For those that don’t watch the TV programme this is how each episode starts.

My little one then independently took each character and explored the ‘garden.’ I had planned to narrate what my son was doing. This was to support his sentence development and continue to build his vocabulary. However, my little one did a very good job of it himself; “Upsy Daisy ride Ninky Nonk.” So instead I played and chose a character to interact with my son’s chosen character.

Now that we have a lot of the resources to create this type of scene, I am planning on recreating this with other TV and story characters. This would be great for the Teletubbies, Twirlywoos or Bing.

This was a lovely activity to do at home and brings a much loved TV programme to life for your child.