Nature: Now In Full Color!

 By the time August rolls around here, the temperature seems to settle into a tolerable range of warm to toasty warm and a break from the scalding hot humidity beckons us away from our air conditioning back to the great outdoors. We've been having a lot of fun in friends' yards, local parks and playgrounds, and even taking activities out to our own play garden. We happen to live nearby some great outdoor spaces, including an incredible botanical garden.

I'm telling you, if I could live at this place, I would. Among several beautiful gardens and greenhouses (including a live butterfly exhibit) sits an amazing children's garden area. It is my dream classroom; it is my dream home! There are living and growing gardens children (and adults) can work in and walk through. Baskets of children's books and accessories hang on tree branches inviting visitors to sit beneath the shade and share in a story stretcher. For those who love the sun, the summer months include a sprinkler park for little feet to pitter patter through. For shade lovers, there are little huts and houses to explore, a shady tunnel, a giant tree house and a covered area with books, art invitations and natural materials to manipulate and discover. Little ones dig in to the dirt and an enormous sandbox. Trees come in all sizes and shapes--even those perfect for climbing. An indoor library and education center offers a respite from the heat or a place to warm up by a fireplace in the winter months. It is a hands-on, full body and sensory experience--you could truly spend a week here and not see it all.

A variety of activities invite gardeners and budding scientists of all ages to come and observe, explore and discover... 

S particularly liked this opportunity to draw a still life. It was a great opportunity for me to teach him about the concept of drawing still life pictures--in which we observe something that does not move, that sits still, and draw what we see and how it makes us feel. Some easels were set up flat on tabletops like this one that S chose, while others were set up vertically. S chose to draw a sculpture of a butterfly nearby (pictured below) choosing the colors he saw in the sculpture, even though his drawings are still in the scribbles stage of life.

S invited me to draw the butterfly sculpture as well. I am hesitant to join young artists in drawing at my adult (albeit very untalented adult) level as sometimes seeing more advanced writers and artists can inhibit early writers and artists. There are some who say if your child is still in the scribbling stages that you should also scribble. I don't strictly adhere to this idea, but I do try for S to have an opportunity to begin his own work before I will draw alongside him. 

Needless to say, you really only need to pack your family and maybe some lunch and snacks to enjoy a day at a place like this--but today I thought we would bring a little take-along activity as well. Sometimes outdoors with so much to do and see, it can be hard to slow down and smell the roses (yeah, there's a garden for that, too!), and having meaningful objects or games to accompany a nature walk can enhance the experience. We packed a pencil pouch with our play binoculars to encourage focus. If you don't have binoculars or a magnifying glass on hand, you can make your own set of play binoculars by stapling or taping two toilet paper tubes together and attaching a length of yarn to allow for wearing around the neck. I decided that today we would go on a color scavenger hunt in the gardens.
We have done this activity before using our journals and some colored pencils. S was quite a bit younger then and just in the beginning stages of learning and recognizing colors. Color recognition is a challenging developmental process. Colors are rarely isolated in the world around us and many shades fall into the same name category. Additionally, the shades of colors that we see in our common crayon and marker sets are not necessarily the same as the ones we see in nature. So on our way to the botanical gardens, we made a stop in the paint section of a hardware supplier and collected a selection of paint sample cards. These are a great learning tool in general. They can be used in matching games, memory games, sorting games and even just for observation of colors in different shades. We also bought a badge clip and I'd packed along a hole punch. In the parking lot I quickly punched a hole in each card and attached them to the badge clip. The badge clip allows the cards to be attached to a belt loop and easily accessed but you can easily just use a metal ring or a brad. You can also do this at home if you're not into DIYing in your car! You might even want to laminate the cards for durability.

a light green leaf...

Well, now we were ready to go! We found colors in all shades and forms of matter...

a brown-winged stowaway

a photo of ripe red tomatoes

little pink flowers up high in a tree

and large purple blossoms at the bottom of a plant

 We photographed what we found. While some outdoor spaces allow for collecting and bringing items home, I like to encourage S at parks and natural preservation spaces to leave items from nature in nature. Taking photos is a great way to capture your activity and at home they can be printed out and made into a book or poster!

We had a fun and colorful morning and will be back soon with some literary fun in the great outdoors! Until then...happy playing!