A walk through nature!

Winter is here, and the weather is just perfect to take a stroll out in nature with your little one. Nature is often an underrated environment considered by parents to entertain their children. Children are the happiest when outdoors, especially when they are surrounded by the lush green of trees. A lot of learning can happen through outdoor explorations. Nature calms children down andthis can be channelized effectively to develop their skills.

Toddlers gather understanding of the world through sensorimotor engagements. While on a nature walk, you can encourage your child to observe what they see, hear, smell, touch and even taste, stimulating their five senses. It is also a great way to develop their gross motor skills as a trail could involve climbing, hopping, leaping, jumping and so on.

There are many engagements that you can do on and after a nature walk. Some of the activities you can do on the walk could be something like the following:
● Encouraging the child to check the weather and make some basic predictions like “will it rain?”, “will the sun come out?” and so on. This helps them gather information and make conclusions developing their data handling skills.
● Carrying a magnifying glass would be very handy! Your child can observe tiny organisms and other natural materials.
● Collecting natural materials like stones, pebbles, twigs, dry leaves, fallen flowers, seeds, fruits can be fun! These can be later made use for some engagements.
● Exposing them to the idea of picnicking in nature with a couple of story books, some snacks and relaxing to the rhythm of nature.

Now for some of the engagements once you get back from the nature walk!

Collage with natural materials

Your toddler can make use of the dry leaves, twigs and flowers picked up and make it into a beautiful art piece! They love collaging and this can be a fresh experience by sticking natural materials. The different textures would make them little thinkers and use different glues(fevistick/fevicol) for each material.

Leaves as paintbrushes!

In a nature walk you may come across different kinds of leaves. These can be tied to a strong twig and used by your toddlers as a paintbrush. Each one would give a different pattern as they paint and they would be mesmerized! You can see how they will keep repeating the process to see if something new is happening

Let’s do some counting!

Math can be easily integrated with nature. The kind of systems, patterns, and cycles that occur in nature can be easily observed, followed and studied. How about we bring in some counting too? Yes, math can be fun if we can think of new and creative ideas to work with children. Like the picture below!

Tracing alphabets!

Every new experience adds to a child’s vocabulary. Nature walks would give them an array of new words like names of trees, flowers, fruits, colors, terrain, weather conditions, organisms, creatures and so on. You could do tracing of alphabets with a twig on sand or mud.