Using natural materials

Intention: Mindfulness, increasing awareness and responding to senses.

Spend time looking around you.

Notice where things are, how they lie, what is next to them.

Ask yourself: What is it? What is its function? How does it work? Why is it that colour? Why is it that shape?

Collect bits and pieces remaining respectful to the environment you are in.

With your collection, first of all notice more detail. What does it feel like? What does it look like when placed alongside different things.

Create an image or a pattern using the pieces you have collected.

All the time notice and be curious about what you feel inside.

The beautiful things about bark rubbing are:

• that you take an image without damaging the tree.

• it is highly tactile

• it urges us to look and feel more deeply.

Use soft non shiny paper and wax crayons, chalk, charcoal or oil pastels.

Paper thin bark that is as soft as your skin is a wonderful, sensual material to work with. All the time you work with your materials, encourage your children and also for yourself, to notice what it feels like. Notice what your senses are telling you.

Notice, and be curious. What is my body feeling? I wonder why that is? What other times do I experience the same feeling?

Be creative with words.

Be confident to write whatever you want. If you feel or notice it, validate it for you and those you are working with.

Let words flow and tell their own story...and all the while notice the impact on your senses and emotions.

Sometimes it is enough to just be with nature.

• What can you see?

• Close your eyes and listen.

• Smell the air.

• Feel the temperature, and the breeze on your skin

Ask yourself...How does this make me feel?

Take the time to be in awe of the intricacies of the natural world around us.

Whatever the water; river, sea, pond or lake; fast flowing, trickling, ebb and flow, or still; listen to it, smell it...let your heart talk to it.

Marvel at the delicacy of a spiders web, the rhythm of ripples in a pond, rain drops trickling down a pane of glass, the path a feather takes as it falls to the ground.

Notice it...and be curious.