SNEAK PEEK: Let’s go on a scavenger hunt
• Becoming human cameras • Creating magic spots
• Playing chickadees and jays • and more
Family gardening is often a balance of play and work.
In our kids’ daily lives, they can easily forget that they are part of the natural world. They go to cupboards, grocery stores, school cafeterias, and restaurants for food; they go to faucets or bottles for water; they turn up a gas heater if they get cold; and they may even turn on the television if they want to watch wild animals in action.
An outdoor garden, however large or small, provides us with a phenomenal opportunity to help our kids grasp how all of us are, in fact, completely dependent upon the earth’s natural resources for our survival. A child with a garden has a context for understanding that grains, fruits, and vegetables come from plants, and that plants don’t grow without sun, soil, water, and air. As they spend more time in the garden and witness the vast array of ecological interactions taking place there, they are likely to see how animals provide us not only with meat, eggs, and milk, but also with many of the things we need to grow plants: fertile soil, in the case of a worm; protection from pests, in the case of a hawk or a wasp; and pollination for crops, in the case of a bee or hummingbird. In this sense, the family garden is an ideal setting for helping all of us bridge the vast divide that sometimes exists between our children (and ourselves) and the natural world around us.
When we plan Life Lab camps and field trips, we always make sure to balance gardening, harvesting, and cooking activities with some open-ended time for kids to engage all of their senses in garden adventures. Kids are natural explorers, and they are never more delighted than when they discover something new: a fly inside a carnivorous plant, a layer of fuzz on the edge of a leaf, a salamander under a board, or a cat track in the mud. These discoveries are teachable moments—while you are engaged in a garden task or even just a walk out to the car, welcome such interruptions and take time to appreciate their discoveries together. The activities here are all designed to help you engage your kids in sensory explorations of the garden. Whether they are searching for prickly plants or listening for birdcalls, you are certain to see your kids’ enthusiasm and interest in the garden awaken as they begin to engage all of their senses.
PROJECT
Let’s Go on a Scavenger Hunt
Send your kids out on a scavenger hunt of the garden and see what they can find. This can be a fun team activity for groups of kids.
Cards or sheets with scavenger hunt list for each team
Pens or pencils for each team
Tell your kids that the garden is full of all sorts of exciting things. By looking very carefully, they might find something they’ve never seen before.
Divide kids into two teams, and give each team a scavenger hunt list.
Have the teams go out and find all of the items on their list. The first team to return with all of their items wins the scavenger hunt (you might make a garden prize, like a strawberry smoothie or a packet of seeds, but you don’t need a prize to motivate kids in this fun challenge).
Copy these scavenger hunt cards and send your kids exploring. Or make lists of your own.
Have your kids observe the garden and then make their own scavenger hunt lists. Another take on this activity is to make treasure hunt lists that lead them from one clue to another. For example, “Find a place where worms and critters eat and poop all day long.” At the compost pile you can have another clue leading them to the next spot.
Blindfold a child and guide him or her through the garden, allowing them to take it in through their other senses.
Blindfold for each child
Find a place in the garden that is full of great sensory experiences. We like to take our kids blindfolded through the sensory garden, where they can feel fuzzy flowers, smell geranium leaves, and hear the burbling of the fountain.
Talk to your kids about being blindfolded, and show them how you will be guiding them and keeping them safe. The safest way we have found to guide a blindfolded child is to walk slowly while holding her hand and elbow from the same side in both of your hands. To guide two or more children, have each child put their hands on the shoulders of the person in front of them.
If you are doing this with two or more children, get them in formation and then blindfold all of them.
Start guiding the front child slowly through the garden. Stop periodically to have them smell and feel things. You can pick objects and hand them to the children to pass back, or describe how they can reach out and touch things as they walk by.
Listen for birds singing, bees buzzing, and other interesting noises, and stop periodically to have them listen to the sounds of the garden.
Stop and pick a mint leaf, cherry tomato, raspberry, or other raw eating treat. Hand one to each child, have him or her take a taste and then guess what it is.
Plan your blindfold walk so that you end up in a beautiful place when they remove their blindfolds. We sometimes walk kids under the kiwi arbor, and then have them tilt their heads up towards the sky before removing their blindfolds. They are always awe-struck when they finally open their eyes and see a dense green kiwi jungle with fuzzy brown fruit above.
Make garden exploration cards for your kids; soon they will be making their own.
Kids very rarely have a chance to be outdoors alone. It can create a very magical feeling. In this activity, you will set up a trail of notes to your child, and then stand back while your child follows the trail through the garden.
Index cards
Colored pens or pencils
Find a trail through a garden that has lots of variety and interesting plants or other things to look at.
Walk the trail alone, and stop every few feet to write a note to your child, encouraging them to use one of their senses to experience the world around them. It might say, “Hey, did you hear that? Stop here and listen until you hear three different bird sounds.” Or, “Mmmm. What is that smell? Pick a leaf of this plant and smell it. What does it remind you of?”
Draw arrows onto cards and place them on the trail if there is an area where they might turn off of the path.
Show your child the beginning of the trail of notes, and leave them to follow it through the garden. Of course, you will be supervising them, but do so subtly, allowing them to feel like they are out there on their own.
Have your kids make trails with notes for you or for their friends. If they are pre-literate, you can help them write and draw each card.
PROJECT
Observing Square-Foot Habitats
Searching for the 100 million microbes in a handful of soil.
You and your kids will see the world through the eyes of a tiny creature as you take some time to explore a garden micro-habitat together.
4 rulers or 4 pieces of string, each cut 1 foot long
Drawing paper
Pencils
Help your child find a small area of the garden that calls out to them.
Have them make a square by placing the 4 rulers or pieces of string at right angles to one another.
Lie down on your bellies with your face right at the edge of the square and shrink down in your imaginations. Look at that square foot as if it were your whole home. Where would you go to find shelter in the rain? Where would you go for water? What would you do for fun? Have your kids look for anything their imaginations come up with: slides, ladders, pools, mountains, you name it.
If they want to, your kids can draw maps of their little habitats. They can name the features or embellish their maps however they like.
Your kids may want to change their square-foot habitat. Maybe they want to bring in a little twig bench for the insects to rest on, create an umbrella with a dry leaf to make a shelter from the rain, or build a teeter-totter out of sticks. Give them time and encouragement to make that little spot their own. Consider having your kids leave their micro-habitat marked for a couple of days, returning daily to observe changes.
Gardens are a great place to check things out.
There is no greater way for a child or an adult to establish a connection with a piece of land than by sitting in a single spot for a few minutes each day, week after week, season after season, observing the natural goings-on in that place.
Help your kids find a magic spot, a special place in the garden to call their own. They are much more likely to do this if you have your own magic spot to visit at the same time.
Explain that wild creatures (from robins to earthworms) are shy, and they will only come out if we get perfectly still and they are able to forget we are there. Make your spots comfortable by clearing a sitting area or placing a stump to lean back on.
Take a few minutes every day, or as often as possible, to head out to your magic spots. If you want, bring a journal or camera to record observations. Sit quietly, tuning into each of your senses. How many sounds can you hear? How does the wind feel on your cheeks? What smells are traveling in the air? What do you see in the area around you?
After each visit, share any exciting discoveries or thoughts you had with one another. After sitting alone for even a few minutes in an outdoor setting, kids will often return with heaps of stories about strange sounds they heard, bugs that crawled on their shoes, or pretty flowers they found that weren’t there just a few days before.
PROJECT
Becoming Human Cameras
(Adapted from Joseph Cornell’s Sharing Nature with Children II)
The garden is full of breathtaking views, both large and small.
By pretending to be cameras and photographers, you and your kids will start to see the garden in a whole new light.
Show your child how you will guide her safely, and then have her close her eyes. Tell her, “Now I’m the photographer, and you’re the camera.”
Walk slowly, holding her hand and elbow in your own hands, until you arrive at a nice viewing point. You might be looking at a big sweeping vista of the surrounding area, or you might bring her face right up close to a sunflower petal catching the sunlight.
Now tell your human camera to open her eyes when you tug gently on her earlobe.
Tug gently to have her take a picture and then close her eyes again.
Do this a few times, taking pictures of various garden delights. Then offer to trade positions and let your budding photographer guide you around the garden.
After being a human camera, your child may enjoy taking actual photos of the garden. Print up the nice shots for a garden gallery, a note card for a grandparent, or to use in a scavenger hunt, returning to try and find the exact spot in the garden.
PROJECT
Playing Chickadees and Jays
This is a great game for a group of kids. Each child will pretend to be a small bird with a nest and some baby birds to feed. Their job is to get food to their baby birds without letting the jays see where their nest is.
1 small cup per child
A bowlful of dry beans
Talk with your kids about chickadees and jays. Explain that chickadees are little birds that build nests in trees. Jays are larger birds and they are nest robbers. This means that jays will eat eggs right out of the nest if they can. Ask your kids, “How do you think the chickadees protect their baby birds?” Talk about camouflaging their nests, flying quietly, misleading the jays by flying to various locations, and other strategies the chickadees might use.
Now it’s time to pretend to be chickadees and jays. Ask for one or two children to be jays. The rest will be chickadees.
Place a bowlful of dry beans in a central location in the garden. Tell your kids, this is the food for the baby chickadees. The babies can’t fly yet, so as the parent birds, they’ll have to deliver the food to their nests.
Give each chickadee a cup, which represents their nest. Have the jays close their eyes and give the chickadees a minute to hide their nests in the garden.
When the chickadees return, it’s time to play. Station yourself near the food source, and explain that chickadees can take 1 bean at a time. Their goal is to collect as many beans as possible in their nest cups. If a jay finds a nest, he can take all the beans for himself and throw the nest on the ground. Then the chickadee’s job is to re-hide the nest and start over with collecting food, all without being spotted by the jay.
Play for a few minutes and then call everyone together to see who collected the most food for their babies. Talk about strategies used by both the chickadees and the jays and then rotate roles and play again.
If you have a big enough space, play Human Camouflage. Instead of hiding nests, have the kids hide themselves. This is like hide-and-seek, but in this version the seeker can’t move and the hiders must camouflage themselves and hide in a line of sight of the seeker. The last person spotted by the seeker becomes the new seeker.
Be your own mason by making hypertufa pots and figures.
