Tree Buddies

Tree buddies a.k.a. meet a tree

How long it’ll take:

20-30 minutes

What the goal is:

In this particular activity, campers should gain appreciation for minor differences in their surroundings and develop acute awareness of certain senses.

What the objectives are:

Campers have fun, connect with the environment, and build trust.

What you’ll need:

• Blindfolds

• A wooded area

What you’ll do:

1. Circle the campers together and have them sit in a circle facing the center. Explain that they will soon have the opportunity to test their senses and connect deeply with their surroundings. Like a wolf (or other animal of your choice), the campers will have to depend on their other senses besides sight to successfully get through the activity.

2. Before beginning, set boundaries for the activity by walking around an area or pointing out landmarks that indicate the barrier.

3. Have campers get into pairs. Each pair of kids will have 1 blindfolded partner and one seeing partner. The seeing partner will slowly guide their blindfolded partner to a natural object (tree, bush, plant, stone, etc.) without saying a single word.

   • Explain the best way to guide someone: gently guide them from the elbow, while walking next to them. Avoid pushing, pulling, walking too fast, or breaking contact.

   • Remember to keep your partner safe by showing them steps up or down, carefully guiding them over roots, and making them aware of terrain changes.

4. When campers have arrived at their natural object, campers will have time to feel all the way around it, smell it, and gather a sense of its size/scope from walking around it. Encourage them to use all of their senses! Remind them that these will be their only clues to find it again.

5. After about 5 minutes at their object, have partners guide their buddies back to the circle and sit down.

   • In order for this to be extra fun and challenging, guides may ‘confuse’ their buddies when coming back to the circle by taking a roundabout way back to the circle, spinning their partner around a few times, etc. to make it more difficult for their partner to find their way back to the object.

6. Once everyone has returned to the circle, remove blindfolds and challenge the campers who were blindfolded to find the natural object they had just been brought to.

7. See how many campers succeeded in finding their object and then switch partners to do it again! Play as many rounds as the campers would like and feel free to increase the difficulty (choosing smaller more difficult to identify objects, further away objects, less time to assess the objects, etc.) as needed.

Variation: Have campers blindfold you and pick 1-2 natural objects to lead you to. See if you can demonstrate using your senses to guess which objects they picked for you.