One of our favorite backyard activities this summer has been making fairy houses. We collect various items...leaves, pine cones, pebbles, flowers, bits of wood and moss, and use our imaginations to create little homes for fairy friends to rest. (We have a patch of forget-me-nots out back and have decided that they are the perfect size for fairies.) My four-year-old loves this and I enjoy it too. Upon my suggestion, a couple 11-year-olds from the neighborhood got into the act too and were fantastically creative.

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Good idea. All our children need to get outside and use their imaginations.

My 5 year old daughter and I constructed a fairy house over the course of a 3 day camping trip at the Rifle River Recreation Area in Northern Michigan. She had the best time creating bath tubs from mussel shells and filling then with water and discovering the dirty bath water left the next day from the bathing fairies. She even picked wild rasberries and clover flowers for their dinner table. The local chipmunks helped with miraculous disappearance of the daily meals. She wants to "come back every year and make sure the fairy house is still built for them". I haven't downloaded the pictures from the camera yet. Will post when I do!

My four year old daughter and I have been building fairy houses as well! I get into it as much as she does. We also go "flower fairy hunting". I told her that the flower fairies live inside the flowers in our backyard so she better not pick all of them because the fairies will have no where to live. She leaves the flowers where they are. For a while, anyway. I'm glad to find that there are others out there who use their imaginations and creativity in the garden!

My daughter is building a Fairy garden and we are going to put Fairy houses and Toad abodes in it, for our friends. I love the pics in this post, hopefully ours will be half as good.