Nurturing Acorns: Environmental Art

What a fun session of Nurturing Acorns at Woodlawn Nature Center that we had recently. We started out with a little letter and shape work, matching letters on rocks to an alphabet chart and drawing with sidewalk chalk letters, shapes, lines, etc. Since we have 2 year old to 5 year olds, we like to give options for various abilities. We flip flopped how we normally do things, spending more time outside as the downpour was coming.

Then we made large circles and mostly made "nature" faces, using the circle as our base and filling in with wood chips, sticks, dandelions, etc. for facial features, hair, and more. The guy on the left is quite the realist, though. He was making an insect with three body parts--head, thorax, and abdomen, which ended up being a lady bug that he colored red. While hesitant at first, once he got going he was on a roll! 

Nurturing Acorns: Spring!

It's spring time at Nurturing Acorns, the nature preschool group at Woodlawn Nature Center. We started by making spring headbands, decorating them with stickers and using our fine motor skills. We also used spring stamps to make scenes on paper.

Our "loose parts" were in a huge suitcase from a presentation over the weekend, so the children and some adults helped us sort and categorize our items. For story time, we talked about changes in Spring, read a couple of books, like "What a Wonderful World", tried some songs, and talked about animals in Spring, such as beavers, deer, and rabbits. We talked about the animals more as we walked the museum and ate snack later. 

Stomp, Stomp, Roar, Roar! Dinosaur Nature Play

We started up Nurturing Acorns, a nature based preschool program at Woodlawn Nature Center, again this week. Our topic was dinosaurs and fossils. We started by making cute little dino hats. Simple costumes like this can be great for little ones to explore nature and engage in animal play. Watch for a post on animal play soon! See it from the back here. We used this basic tutorial from cutting tiny bites, yet just used a stapler instead of glue. Additionally, since we have so many two-year-olds in our group, we had many items precut. Older children were welcome to cut their own and change it up. Each tail ended up a little different, which is always nice! We also had some literacy activities, with letter rocks, alphabet sheets, and dinosaur words.

A Natural Holiday: Preschool Style

This morning we had our last session of Nurturing Acorns, our nature preschool group that meets once a week. We had a small group, yet enjoyed meeting with everyone throughout the fall! 

We started by writing and drawing in our nature journals, adding a picture of the child to help remember our special time together studying spiders, trees, nocturnal animals, and more! Then we made paper strip Christmas trees (Thanks Mommy Savers!), talking about the children's trees at home, shapes, and colors. It was great glueing practice! One family recently went to Eby Pines for their tree. What great memories and a fun way to get outside!

Later we went out to the larger open space for a little holiday action! I love these Christmas action cards from Oopsey Daisy. We marched like a nutcracker, melted like a snowman, twirled like a snowflake, and spread our branches like a tree! I love using action cards like this from preschool to at least 12 years old, depending on the audience! 

We have a very young group (mostly 2-year-olds) so tried playing with the play dough while we read a few stories. I love seeing what they come up with. As additions, we had letter stamps, so some spelled there names. We had a few wooden and foam trees, red wooden beads, holiday pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks, and more as loose parts add ins. 

We had more books available, yet these were some of my favorites for this time of year, such as The Snow Tree , 10 Christmas Lights , Counting to Christmas , and A Wish to Be A Christmas Tree. I also really like all of Jan Brett's books for wintertime (affiliate links). Many of these books talk about evergreens, animals in winter, and natural decorations. In The Snow Tree, I like how the various animals help decorate the white tree with something colorful that is related to them, like the Blue Jay's feather. In Counting to Christmas, there is obviously an emphasis on counting, but we also see the girl making and giving back to the animals nearby and decorating a tree outside. In A Wish to Be a Christmas Tree, the animals remind the large tree how it is a home to so many animals and they decorate it each holiday season. 

Outside, we went on a special holiday hike, taking Christmas items from my "magic" bag and trying to find them in the woods. I based it off this fun activity from Woodland Trust Nature Detectives. They have GREAT stuff. It's based out of the UK, though, so some things use different names. I also often take their great ideas and modify it a bit. This scavenger hunt was very text heavy for preschoolers, so I found objects for many of the items and put them in my magical bag. Outside we found twigs shaped like reindeer antlers, logs like yule tide log, something white like Santa's beard, and more! 

It was a fun way to get outside on a chilly morning and celebrate the holidays!

For snack inside, we had snowman string cheese and cucumber snowmen, complete with red pepper scarf and raisin eyes and buttons! They were just right! We also worked on a paper chain to help decorate the nature center. 

We also did pinecone weaving (Thanks for the inspiration Rainy Day Mum!) and holiday pattern blocks. They're always fun! I like the pattern block templates from PreKinders. 

Everyone was interested in making a holiday treat for the birds, spreading peanut butter on pinecones and rolling them in bird seed. We changed out many items in the sensory bin to make it more like the holiday time as well!

One girl even set up the puppet theater area like our books where the animals decorated the trees! I loved how she applied the story to her play! She always has a great imagination! 

Oh Deer!

We started out our nature preschool program looking out the wildlife viewing window. It's always nice to look at the squirrels climbing the trees, wondering if they are looking at us as well! We started out stamping things related to deer in our nature journals, like tracks, trees, and leaves.

We made fun little habitat hats from Growing Up Wild, talking about the four things that all animals need: food, space, shelter, and water. These are our basics as well, which we discussed. For story time we read a few books, though the kids were ready to explore and play. We had leather, sinew, rawhide, and antlers to touch and feel as well. Later we went on a hunt to find animals related to deer in the nature center. These are a few books I like on deer for younger ones: 

Deer,  Whitetail Deer , and Jim Arnosky's All About Deer . We also looked at
Big Tracks, Little Tracks: Following Animal Prints (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science, Stage 1) and Tracks, Scats and Signs . These are both good books for animals and tracks!

We found caribou, antlers, and elk!

We touched deer hair, looked at the tracks, found sinew being used in the wigwam, and looked at the fawn, talking about how fawn have virtually no scent and have spots that help them be camouflaged. We talked about deer we had seen recently, such as one working hard to cross the road and avoid our car the other day. 

On our hike, we looked for those things that all animals, including deer, need, like water and food! 

 

We also found space and shelter! We turned our hats around as we found each of the items that make up a habitat.

 

We also explored tree stumps and big fallen logs.

They found some food the deer might eat and helped the deer feel at home in the woods! 

It was a beautiful fall day and the woods are changing regularly! Inside, we made deer sandwiches after we washed up, using pretzels for antlers. These must be male deer. 

Later, we played with a few deer animals and play dough. The deer toys were the hit of the day as the children really enjoyed the baby and the dad, as they kept calling them. 

As we spent some time looking at native groups, we also strung some beads, which turned into stamps for the play dough. We played with rocks as well, matching rocks with letters to the letter on the alphabet chart. 

Nature can help us build literacy skills! 

Play dough, loose parts, and imaginative play is where it is at!