My Town

There’s something about a jar of cookies that small hands find hard to resist, and this set turns that pull into thoughtful play. Each pretend sandwich cookie has three parts: a chocolate-brown “biscuit” top embossed with a classic pattern, a base with a raised shape, and a creamy white filling with a matching shape cut out of it. Children look at the shape on the base, search for the filling that fits it, and press the cookie together. A star goes with a star, a heart with a heart, an oval with an oval.

It starts as a matching game and easily becomes more. Cookies can be sorted, counted, stacked, served at a tea party or “sold” in a pretend bakery. Older children can play a memory game by hiding the fillings and remembering which shape is missing. Because there’s more than one way to play, the set can keep a child interested well beyond the first time they’ve matched every shape.

The pieces are smooth, wipe-clean plastic and pack neatly back into their clear jar with a screw-top lid. It’s easy to store, easy to take along, and satisfying to tip out and start again.

What's Included

• 3 × wooden pine houses (unpainted)
• 5 × wooden peg people in assorted sizes (unpainted)
• 4 × green wooden trees and bushes
• 1 × wooden STOP sign
• 1 × wooden 30 km/h speed sign
• 1 × roll of road tape
• 6 × paint pots (red, yellow, blue, green, white, black)
• 1 × paintbrush

Total: 22 pieces · Recommended age: 3+ years

What the OT Says

As an occupational therapist, I love sets that ask children to be the makers, not just the players. Painting the houses and peg people is a wonderful fine motor activity. Holding a small brush encourages a refined tripod grasp, and painting within the edges of a peg person's head or a house door builds precision, hand-eye coordination and visual-motor control. The helper hand steadies the piece while the dominant hand paints, which gives natural practice in bilateral coordination.

The painting stage also asks for planning and sequencing. Choosing colours, deciding which part to paint first, waiting for paint to dry and rinsing the brush between colours all draw on executive function skills: planning, working memory, patience and task completion. For children who find open-ended tasks overwhelming, the clear shapes give enough structure to start, while still leaving every choice to them.

Once painted, the town becomes a small-world play space, which I value highly for language and social-emotional development. Children narrate, assign roles and act out familiar routines such as going to school, crossing the road or visiting a neighbour. The road signs offer a gentle, natural way to talk about road safety and community. Laying and peeling the road tape adds another fine motor challenge, along with spatial planning as children work out how roads connect their houses.

Every child will make this town their own, and there is no single right way to build or play with it. I recommend it for home use as a shared creative project, and for therapy rooms and classrooms as a versatile resource for fine motor, planning and storytelling goals.