Bambi on Paper: A File Folder Playset

What's the use of having a ridiculously elaborate crafting toy, if you don't find an excuse to play with it nearly every single day?

I've enjoyed making a few of these file folder games for the girls, and although they haven't been often played with yet, the girls tend to go through phases of what kinds of activities they enjoy. Whereas a few months ago they did worksheet after worksheet and activity page after activity page throughout the entire day, lately they've been going through a renaissance of playing out wildly imaginative dramas with each other and their menagerie of toy animals. The time for zealous playing of file folder games will come again.

The girls have been enjoying using Cricut die cuts as characters in their imaginative play, however, so I thought up a combination of file folder game and pretend toy, and came up with this file folder playset from Bambi, which we're currently reading at bedtime (well, we forgot to bring it with us on vacation, so we're currently reading a Magic Schoolbus chapter book at bedtime, but Bambi will be waiting for us upon our return):
I cut blue scrapbook paper for the background on both halves of the file folder, and I cut in cardstock and more scrapbook paper several kinds of trees and bushes and grasses, and several kinds of animals, from the Animal Kingdom Cricut cartridge. This is a Bambi playset, so I focused on the animals that we've met in Bambi so far--three fawns, two does, two bucks, and squirrels, butterflies, and birds.

The background and all the foliage is glued to the file folder--I tried to make a woodsy area and a meadow, and I put a few smaller trees towards the back for some perspective, but overall choosing the correct size for each of these elements was by far the hardest part, especially those dang roomy trees. Stapled to the front of the file folder is a 4"x6" manilla envelope, where the girls are meant to keep all the parts of the playset.

I also used the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge to make labels for the main characters in Bambi, labels that Willow enjoyed using in her playset:
Sydney greatly enjoyed spinning out delicious yarns in her playset, but I learned from her that I need to make all future playset characters from cardstock, not scrapbook paper, because scrapbook paper is only printed on one side. Look how destroyed she is that she can't figure out how to make the deer she's holding face the same way as the other deer:

Of course, there's also a good math lesson in that, I suppose.

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