Happy beautiful fall day :) Because I was so happy with the colors as I drove home from work today, I thought I would write about a super fun activity that Aunt Lexie did with the kiddos a few weeks ago when she watched them while we attended a wedding. In fact, she wrote about it for me :) She took them on a nature scavenger hunt at her aunt's place. The kids had a GREAT time. Here is what she had to say about it:
When you asked me to watch the kids for the day/night, I wanted to come
up with something that would keep us all occupied for awhile. While I
was thinking of activities I remembered how much fun the kids had going
to Bonnie's A-Frame Cottage last year. I then thought of the stuff I
used to do with my sisters there when we were kids, and we would pick
leaves and just run around or go down to the lake to check out the marsh
land (Rush Lake, but it's really more marsh-like). I then came up with
an idea to do a scavenger hunt; so instead of reinventing the wheel, I
went to Pinterest to see what was out there for examples. There were so
many that I decided to combine a variety of options. I started to make
my own document on the computer, but realized that this would just be
too time consuming so I decided to cut up the examples from Pinterest
and put them in a bag for the kids to take turns with leading"the
hunt."
When we actually did our hunt, I wrote up a sheet for the kids
with some basic rules like: take turns, take your time, pictures will be
taken of items we can put in our bag, and, of course, our number one rule
was to HAVE FUN! I asked Caden to get one
yellow plastic grocery bag and one white Target bag (that way each kid
could keep track of their own bag and take responsibility for their bag
as well). After we went through the rules,
and the kids decided who was going to pick first, they noticed that on
back of some of the pictures or clues I had the word "picture" written.
One of the rules was that a picture had to be taken of an item that we
couldn't put in our bag and someone had to be in the picture while the
other sibling took the pictures. The majority of the pictures taken were
by Lilli or Caden.
Our hunt took about two hours with a snack break in
between. I kept it a secret what we were going to be doing with our
"pickings" that we placed in our bag. It was so cool to see what the
kids would come up with. Some of the clues were based upon descriptive
words, which made the kids have to think outside of the box. They always
had to search for something that was "found in nature" versus just using a man made object as one of their finds for the clues. We got so much
exercise outside going back and forth from the front of the cottage to
the back of the cottage down to the lake to the corn field across the
road. It was also a hoot to see how curious they would become about an
ordinary object that we might take for granted on a daily basis:
For me it was so much fun to
enjoy Lilli's delight each time we found a Lady Bug/Asian Beetle. She
at one point stated, I'm a Lady Bug Scientist! How cute is that?!?
Anyways,
once we got back home we made fall collages with our pickings. Our
fall collages were made by the kids taking their pickings and organizing
them on a laminating sheet that I brought over. Once they had their
design, they then got to feed their creation into my laminator that I
brought along for the project. The kids really seemed to enjoy that their projects go"ironed" by the laminator and were now flat.
Didn't Alexis do a great job?! The kids were really excited with what they made. We ended up hanging them in their bedroom windows. I forgot to take a pic while it was still light outside :( I will try to post something later or update this post when I think of it during the daylight. Here are some other cute bonus pics:
Until later!
Barby
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