Nature Treasures

     One of my favorite things about Tinkergarten is how much we work with nature treasures.  Nature treasures are anything that a child likes the smell, look, or feel of.  Depending on where you live and how much supervision you apply taste can also be added to this.  PLEASE DO NOT EAT anything you can not identify 100%!  Nature treasures help to build a sense of wonder and preciousness with children.  Being able to pick up and keep what ever they want?!
     Every trial class I do, which tends to be Stone Soup, and for the first class of every season, our opening activity is to collect nature treasures.  This really helps the kids to get to know the area and what it provides.  Whenever Chloe and I go to a new place we go around and check out how the nature treasures here are different from the ones at home.  In future blogs you will notice that many of them start out with a hike where you will be collecting nature treasures, but until then here are a few ideas:
- Talk about how they feel.  Try rubbing them on different parts of your body, do they feel different on the inside of your arm then on the bottom of your foot?  Your cheek?  Threw your pants?
-Smell them.  Compare the smell of a wet pine cone to a dry one.  A fresh flower to a dry flower.
-Taste them.  PLEASE only taste things that you are 100% sure will not harm you or your child, we tend to leave the taste out of it in Tinkergarten.
-Sort them into piles.  Big and small.  Colors,  Type.

There are so many ways to play with and learn with nature treasures, I am sure you can come up with a never ending list!  If you want to share the way you play please leave a comment below =]!