Nature walks are kind of a big deal in our house. If you've been watching my Instagram stories for a while, you have probably seen some pretty silly videos of us on our nightly nature walk. It usually involves at least one cape and lots of racing down the sidewalk.
The other night we set out looking for all of the different kinds of leaves, rocks and sticks we could find. Reed doesn't like getting dirty "icky," so this is a rare picture of him touching a rock on the ground. He definitely wouldn't consider sitting on the ground or stepping off the pavement in order to get it!
Sidenote: How lucky am I that he doesn't like getting dirty? That's definitely in both mine and John's genes. No joke- John showers 3x a day. We're very clean people.
We had fun looking at all of the different bushes and trees in our neighborhood together that night. He now knows that leaves grow on trees, leaves change colors, and that there are all different types of leaves.
I went home and constructed a sensory tray for him. I asked my neighbor for a scrap from the company who happened to be putting astroturf in her backyard that day. It was a perfect base for the tray, but you can use dirt, rocks, grass, brown sugar (fake dirt), or anything else that depicts something that dinosaurs may have walked on.
In order to make a lesson out of it, I gathered some books from our book nook and Daddy whipped out a picture of a dinosaur's birthday party (Reed is currently obsessed with birthdays). When I presented the tray to him, I reminded him that he found all of the sticks, leaves and rocks and had him touch the different leaves. We talked about textures like how the leaves with jagged edges looked a lot like the dinosaur's teeth.
I read him his books while he played with the dinosaurs. We counted dinosaurs on the pages, talked about colors, and matched up his dinosaurs with the ones in the books. He also showed me his best dinosaur impression (which he does a little too often, especially in public really loudly). Once he lost interest in the tray, we took out the colored pencils and drew on the coloring page that Daddy made.
I'm going to leave the tray and books on the kitchen table so that he can play with it as often as he wants. Whenever we have these out, he demands that we read the corresponding books to him while he eats. Of course we'll read to you, Buddy!
S U P P L I E S
2. Dinosaurs: Wal-Mart $1.00 in store
B O O K S
1. Roar
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