🍓 Fruit and Vegetable Invitation to Play Kit

🍓 Fruit & Vegetable Invitation to Play Kit
Handmade sensory tools & loose parts for year-round play inspired by nature’s bounty
Available now at www.autumnfraser.ca

Spark curiosity, creativity, and connection to the natural world with this open-ended play kit inspired by fruits and vegetables. Thoughtfully designed for use in Strong Start programs, early childhood education centers, and early elementary classrooms, this set supports the BC Early Learning Framework by encouraging inquiry, exploration, and meaningful engagement through play.

What's Inside:

• 🍋 A lemon-printed silk scarf – perfect as a fruit-stand worker's apron, a flag for your lemonade stand, or a flowing storytelling prop.

• 🍓 A handwoven strawberry "shopping" bag – ideal for dramatic play, market day activities, and role-playing opportunities.

• 🌽 3 colourful cotton cloths – each patterned with fruits and vegetables, perfect for small-world play mats, picnic setups, or storytelling backdrops.

• 🥕 7 handmade, bio-based resin play pieces – in three unique shapes, each embedded with a tiny fruit or vegetable motif. These sturdy tools are sensory-safe, light-table-friendly, and built for creative play with oobleck, playdough, kinetic sand, and water.

• 🌀 2 wooden spinning tops shaped like fruits – great for building fine motor skills and introducing simple science concepts like force and motion.

• 🍊 3 wooden citrus fruit coasters – can be used for pretend café play, colour sorting, or pattern making.

• 🍑 2 soft silicone fruits – tactile tools with two textured sides that support sensory exploration and language development.

Why Educators Love It:

This kit invites year-round, cross-curricular exploration. In spring, children can “plant” pretend gardens and sort veggies by season. In summer, it becomes a bustling farm stand with silk scarves for signage and shopping bags for market role play. Autumn brings harvest-themed sensory bins, and winter can include indoor picnic invitations or cozy story sessions inspired by books like:

📚 "Eating the Alphabet: Fruits & Vegetables from A to Z" by Lois Ehlert
📚 "Eat Your Superpowers!" by Toni Buzzeo
📚 "Happy Veggies" by Mayumi Oda
📚 "The Ugly Vegetables" by Grace Lin

Incorporating these titles supports bookish play and early literacy. Educators can pair loose parts from the kit with read-alouds to spark discussion, dramatization, and vocabulary building.

Linked to the BC Early Learning Framework:

This set supports the following areas of learning:

• Well-being and Belonging: Encourages collaboration and social-emotional growth through role play and shared stories.

• Communication and Literacies: Expands language through symbolic play, storytelling, and exploring print-rich environments.

• Identities, Social Responsibility, and Diversity: Offers inclusive opportunities to discuss different cultural foods, gardening traditions, and food access.

• Inquiry and Exploration: Fosters wonder through hands-on experimentation, sensory experiences, and imaginative role play.

Made with natural, reusable materials and infused with love and learning, this kit is a beautiful, sustainable addition to classrooms, daycares, and playrooms across British Columbia and beyond.

🧠 Play Ideas for Parents & Caregivers:

🥕 “Market Day” Dramatic Play
Set up a fruit stand or café using the bag, scarf, and cloths.
Your child can be the farmer, the grocer, the chef — or all three.

Ask: “What’s fresh today?” “How much does that strawberry cost?” “Can I pay in leaves?”

🌽 Sorting & Grouping
Use the citrus coasters and resin pieces to sort by colour, shape, or texture.

“Let’s find everything that’s yellow!”
“Can we group smooth textures and bumpy ones?”

🌀 Spin & Observe
Use the fruit tops to explore motion and prediction.

“Which top spins the longest?”
“What makes it go faster?”
→ Introduces early science and curiosity-led investigation.

🍓 Story Seeds
Lay out a cloth as the “farm.” Add fruit pieces. Let your child tell a story:

“Who’s coming to visit the farm today?”
“What happens when the peach rolls away?”

🍋 Sensory Setup
Add the resin fruits to a tray with kinetic sand, slime, or oobleck.
Use the scarf or cloths as a base. Explore textures, bury and reveal items, or make prints.
→ Enhances sensory integration and fine motor development.

🍊 Language Boost
Use the silicone fruits to describe what you feel: bumpy, soft, squishy, cool.

“This one feels like orange peel!”
Encourages descriptive language, comparison, and vocabulary growth.

💬 A Note to Grownups:

You don’t need fancy scripts or complicated setups. Let your child take the lead. Offer questions, listen to their ideas, and follow their curiosity. This kind of imaginative, materials-rich play builds confidence, creativity, and connection — all in ways that feel joyful and easy.

This is summer learning made simple, screen-free, and sensory-smart.
🍑 And it's made for real families like yours.