Mother nature provides us with wonderful sensory items

One can never walk along the trail of shells without stopping to touch, pocket or exclaim over a few

1571437f5417c444f370fda0aada448aNeeding an activity to keep your children busy? Take a walk outside. Nature provides us as parents with an abundance of play ideas, in order to explore all the wonderful opportunities around us to keep our children busy firstly you need to switch on and look. Once you have noticed you then need to dig deep and find your creative side. Let’s take something so simple as a leaves. They are all around us, in plentiful supply. There is many different shapes and colours and they make one of the best sensory activities around.

It doesn’t matter if your child is two or twelve years of age, with a bit of creativity you can find a range of different leaf activities for your child, older children can even help design the activities. Visually leaves are beautiful so find a basket and get outside and gather. They can be different colours and lots of different shapes. Tactilely they are soft if you pick them from the tree and as they dry out they harden and have that lovely crunchy feel. Auditory they make the crunch sound or swish as you move them around. Leaves are endless in their sensory benefits.

Now for the fun activities, you can sort into colour, or by shape. As you do so pay attention to the sounds, the feelings, and add some words in like. Crunky, soft. Glossy. Did you know you can use leaves as a paint brush? You can paint leaves, notice how this feels. Older children can draw the leaf in detail or learn the names of the trees that they have come from.

kidcraftsThat’s just leaves, now start to notice the sticks, the gum nuts, rocks, pinecones, bark, feathers and flowers. Mother nature provides us with wonderful sensory items, remember the last time you went to the beach – one can never walk along the trail of shells without stopping to touch, pocket or exclaim over a few. Or sitting by a creek with rocks, every child touches, rolls rocks over their palm and throws them into the water. All our sensory senses are stimulated, the feel, the smell, the sounds. So next time you are needing an activity to keep your children busy, take a walk outside, basket in hand and see what they can collect and find. Notice your environment as there is endless activities ready just waiting to be notice and for you to be a bit creative.

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