Nature Activities
Nature Treasure:
Bringing an egg carton along for your walk, look for nature treasure.
Different explorers are drawn to different items. Some enjoy rocks, some sticks, some bugs, some leaves...put each small treasure you find into one of your egg carton holes.
Chalk for Literacy and Numeral Exploration:
Letters and numbers can be written with chalk.
Letters and numbers can be scrambled by an adult and your learner can spray water on the letters and numbers in alphabetic or numerical order.
You can make a grid with letters (middle pic) and missing spots for jumping spots. Your learner must jump in either alphabetic order or numerical order, using the empty spots to jump.
Fairy Houses
Children love building structures in the wild, for themselves and for magical creatures. Fairy houses or gnome houses are easy to make. Using sticks, leaves, berries, found objects of all sorts, children use their imagination to build these structures. Larger structures for children are best built with an adult using long sticks (especially any with a Y shape at the top for supporting other leaning sticks), dug holes, and a bound secured top).
Earth Day Crowns
Learners draw small pictures of their favorite Earth inspired elements. Trees, fruit, veggies, butterflies, ocean, rainbows, clouds, sun, moon, flowers, favorite animals...learners cut these objects out for gluing onto their crown. Then for the crown, cut a long white piece of paper in half. First learners color these crowns green. Next, they cut inch long strips across the top, then cut the tips of each strip so they are pointy like grass. Learners glue their earth images to the crown. Crown is sized to a child’s head and connected with tape or staple.
Shadow Art
Using fence, flowers, weeds-find a sunny area that is abutting a line of wild (sidewalk with flowers nearby works great). Students can trace shadows with any tools. Students can chalk the shadow shapes they see, crayon, paint, etc. Great for focused attention and shared activity with other children.
Seasonal Q-Tip Art
Learners take white paper and long strips of brown paper. Show your learner that trees are built with upward reaching “Y” shapes. They can cut their brown strips for thick trunk and thinner branches. They can reach their branches up toward the sun off their trunk. Using seasonal colors they can either draw leaves, flowers, etc., OR if you have paint and Q-Tips, leaves and flowers can be made with Q-Tips. For winter, use black paper and white crayon for snow.
Leaf or Flower Number Lines
Perfect for fall leaves or spring flowers. Students find 10 objects to tape on their number line. You can make a number line starting at 1 or 11. Students can build 1-10 or 11-20, or another set of ten numbers they are working toward understanding.
Fairy Tale Drama
If you have two or three people at home, use a hula-hoop or another tool to create an enclosure. Each person will need a rock or another small object from the natural world to play a “part” in the fairy tale. This activity is perfect for after a fairy tale read aloud. Learners can re-enact the fairy tale using just elements from the natural world. First, they work together to collect whatever they think they might need. Below are pictures from students playing “The Three Little Pigs,” using sticks, red leaves, and yellow leaves (for wood, bricks and straw). We used four rocks for parts (three of one color and a fourth a different color for the big bad wolf).
Pine Cone Dissection
Great read aloud from Highlights:
https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/treasures-in-a-pinecone
After learning a bit about pine cones, hunt for your own pine cone. Using your hands and possibly another common household tool (butter knife or kid scissors), let your learner dissect and explore a pine cone. This can be extended into math by grouping seeds into groups of 10, counting by 10s, seeing how many seeds you’ve found.
Egg Hunt
If you have a stash of plastic easter eggs in your basement, they can be used for many games. You can hide numbers, letters, treasures of all sorts...I used this activity as a celebration of our alphabet study. We hunted all the letters of the alphabet and then put them in order as a group activity. We found uppers and lowers (my learners were nearly six).
Building a Big Number
Dandelions to 100!
As we began to study ways to get to 100, we used groups of 10 to group count. We gave our learners the challenge of searching the nearby field for as many dandelions as we could find. Then each learner came to the center where we’d piled our dandelions. They each had a chance to count 10. We ended up having 210 dandelions! We made a chart to show our learning.
Mud Art!
Squirrel Math
Know where you can find acorns? On a walk one day, we discovered an area near the school with loads of acorns. My fellow Kindergarten teacher and I decided to make some fun squirrel math activities using the acorns. The first thing we did was pretend to be squirrels and collect as many acorns as we could. We talked about foraging and we studied squirrels (My favorite read aloud for this is by Brian Wildsmith, though there are many great read alouds about squirrels--you can find them online and authors reading them online too).
Later we organized acorns we’d collected into friendly numbers. We grouped them by 10 and counted to 100.
As we learned about “more than, greater than, less than, equal to” we used partner math to practice. We found two sticks for our “alligator mouth” that opens toward the greatest number. We used 10 acorns to challenge one another with alligator math. So one student might place six acorns on one side and four on the other. Their partner had to make the alligator mouth open toward the greatest number. Then they switched roles. Here are pics of “equal than” and “greater than” examples students made.