A little Christmas magic for curious little hands. Whatever your Christmas plans, this is one tray they will come back to again and again.
Pour the red rice into one half of the tray and the green into the other, then hide the gingerbread men, the tiny presents and the Christmas tree. Your Mini Maker can fish out the pony beads with the tweezers and thread them onto a pipe cleaner to bend into a candy cane.
Picking beads out of rice with tweezers takes real coordination, and threading them in a red, white and green pattern is early maths in disguise. With gingerbread men, little presents and a Christmas tree to play with, a tray like this gets children talking and making up stories, and all that chatter feeds straight into their language.