Our program has a collaboration going on this year with a therapeutic farm a few miles away. Their director is an old friend of mine, and as we were beginning this collaboration, she confided to me that she had always been a little obsessed with fairies (she told me a story about her mother bringing her and her sister to a small clearing in a wooded area and showing them a large stump which she said was the place where the fairies danced in the moonlight!). She wanted one of our first activities there to be building fairy houses. We took the kids into the woods where there were plenty of loose parts. Their nature director had even added lots of stones, shells, and other bits and pieces. My class was first to go, and my kids seemed to be having difficulty visualizing what to do. I had wanted the experience to be more organic, but in the end, I had to kind of coach them to get things started. I heard that as other classes visited, having the houses constructed by previous groups helped spark things.

In Boothbay, Maine, you can visit the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens — they have (or had) a Fairy Garden Village that children – and ONLY children! – can build in. It was quite wonderful. I visited about 3 or 4 summers ago…. and was very jealous of the children being allowed past the rope dividing the Fairy Village from the World. I itched to get in there!! But alas, too old. Waaaayyy too old!