Silence may be golden, but the sound of little voices playing ‘make believe’ in an imaginary rainbow princess land is truly priceless. Over a year ago, one of my sister-in-law’s close friends gifted us our first play mat. It had a few different castles, woods and lakes, and the girls went crazy over it. They have tons of characters/figurines, and they will spend hours making up dialogue and scenarios with the different people. I discovered Camp Castle last week, and I was legitimately going googly-eyed over Hayley’s beautiful designs. When I saw her Rainbow Land Play Mat, I knew the girls would adore it, and I was right – they are obsessed. I shared a few videos on my Instagram the other day and had a lot of curiosity about the mats, with a few questions about which figurines we love and also how do the girls use it. I wanted to write a blog post dedicated to this!
I recently shared a blog post with 100 suggestions on activities to do with your kids this summer. The 9th item on the list was to play with a play mat (now updated with Camp Castle link!) – it is such a simple, good-for-the-imagination activity. We have dozens of figurines – all of our favorite cartoon TV show and movie characters, all sorts of animals, cars, mermaids, etc. They’re all stored in Container Store clear shoe boxes! Some of our favorites are linked below.
Turtles & Tiaras peg action figures [we have a few of the peg princesses and love them all!] | Disney princess set | Paw Patrol | HABA Dolls 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 | My Little Ponies | Tow truck and cars | Puppy figurines
When I play with the girls, we will each grab 2-3 characters and set them up on the mat to begin. For example, with our new rainbow land mat, we had Moana at the water, the horses on the farm, the unicorns in the magic forest, etc. Then we will each have one character whom we voice – i.e. I’ll play Cinderella for a bit, then become a mermaid, troll, etc. The girls’ imaginations are much more wild and free than mine, so I typically let them come up with the narrative, but it’s fun to play along and sometimes direct new problems or situations. This might all sound very obvious to you, but the question was asked, so I wanted to share how we play! I played with the big girls for 30 minutes yesterday afternoon, then left to fold laundry and do dishes and came back after 30 minutes, and they were still at it! I put these mats on the same level of solo play time as my friend Julie’s Young Wild & Friedman play dough kits.
Hayley, the owner of Camp Castle, has a variety of play mat themes and sizes. Ours is the medium size, which is perfect for our playroom. I love her smaller ones and think they’d be really great for airplane or car travel (if you had a little portable tray like this one)! Our mat is such high quality – it is thick enough to give you good padding, but thin enough to roll up and can be put into one of these bags. Four of her many cute themes are shown below.
As you can tell, we truly love this product. I really recommend buying your kids or your friends’ kids a play mat – they’ll have so much (screen free!) fun. Make sure to use ‘AILEE’ at the checkout for 10% off your order! You can see how much fun the girls have in the photos below.
This post is not sponsored, but I was gifted the play mat, and this post contains affiliate links. I genuinely adore this shop! As always, I promise to share my honest thoughts on products we try.
