I’ve been asked to help plan a nature-themed day camp for 6-10 year old kids at the museum where I work. The museum is on four acres (1.6 hectares) in a small city and has some gardens and a tiny pond but is not really a nature area, and we mostly won’t be able to go off site. The 24 kids will have lots of unstructured play time, but we also want to have activities they can participate in that will teach them some of the skills of a naturalist. These need to be hands on, engaging, and age appropriate things they can do with their counselors in about an hour. No lectures, not even any extended introductions before they dive in, and no sitting and watching screens. The Seek app will certainly be included in the curriculum (plenty of bugs to find in the gardens) but I’d appreciate hearing what activities you’ve done with kids this age that might work. Thank you!
I’m a sixteen year old. I admire that you have a want to help teach young kids out nature. Hope you all have a good time. I’m a Birder/Birdwatcher I think Birdwatching could be a very fun learning experience for younger kids.
Thank you, I agree! The challenge is that the Museum tends to have so many loud kids when it is open that the birds mostly stay up high or out of view. As soon the Museum closes we have many birds flying around! And for new bird watchers it can be really challenging to watch birds that are staying out of the way. I need to figure out how to make some kind of a blind or put a feeder where the kids can see it but the birds feel safe.
That would be so cool! I wish I could recommend more to you. But that’s all I have. Lol.
maybe some drawing? There are lots of resources for nature journalling, even some specifically for young children. The main tips are to encourage them to ask questions about what they are drawing, and of course to not criticise their drawing skills.
you could create a little scavenger hunt type thing: “find a plant with fewer than ten leaves, find an insect on the ground, find two insects interacting”
if it’s all right to pick up things from the ground then kids could be encouraged to make little ‘nests’ with them, or find a handful of interesting objects and use them to tell a story.
good luck!
As kowhaitreehugger said, I also thought scavenger hunt. Like setting up some pieces that the kids have to find and identify. They’ll have a short checklist of identifying features that they have to match up to the animal. Maybe a short wiki page for each too, describing where they live, what they eat, and some interesting facts.
Find a Cardinal: 5pts
Identifying Features:
Bright red feathers
Pointy head feathers
Black around the beak and eyes
Interesting Facts
Only the males are bright red, the females are reddish brown.
They are native to the US and mexico.
They sing to mark their territory.
As a former Girl Scout leader I highly recommend preparing at least twice as many activities as you think you will need. 24 is a lot of students.
Give them a list what to find in the garden:
Find something with 8 legs and make a drawing or a photo
Find a red flower
Find a blue berry
Find leaves with hairs on the underside
Find an animal without legs
Find a flower visited by a bee
Find an animal that is making sound
…
This is all very nice, but where is this museum located, climate wise? Late November is not ideal for insects and flowers in many places. Or is this day camp being planned for a different time of the year?
Just a note that there is tremendous developmental difference between a 6 year old and a ten year old, especially noticeable if a six year old lags a bit and a ten year old is mature for age.
Generally a ten year old may be able to concentrate longer but will want a more complex task, with more variables, so as much as possible, I would try to create variants of each activity, tailoring it to distinct age groups, so that the suggested scavenger hunt, for example, might be a simple ten minute one with 3 color based clues for the 6 year olds, who can draw the items they find, all the way to more complex for the older kids, who perhaps work in pairs to find “as many as possible in 15 minutes” of specific items and return to base to tally these as a group.
Because the six year olds will generally need more directions at the outset of any activity and longer to wrap up, the two groups might take equal amounts of time, even though the ten year olds would be doing the actual activity for longer. It’s just how developing brains work.
I 100% agree with @Thunderhead that you will likely need twice as many activities as you think.
We are in California, and the camp is being planned for spring and summer. So being outside won’t be a problem.
We will certainly do scavenger hunts!
As others have said, will need to have many more activates ready than that. What other ideas do you have?
Definitely nature journals and drawing, yes. I remember very distinctly when someone visited my class when I was a child and we went outside to draw trees. Looking at an individual tree and trying to draw what I saw instead of a cartoon of a tree really opened my eyes in a lasting way.
See if the local parks or wildlife rehab centers can do a program for your camp and bring in some live animals.
I’ve done a butterfly life cycle activity with kids. There are various versions of it online, like one on a paper plate and a similar craft activity using pasta. I found a lot of kids actually knew about the butterfly life cycle from school and launched into telling their parents all about it. Fun and educational for everyone, but it does take some prepping and acquiring craft materials.
Another activity we’ve done is flower-pollinator matching games, where the kids have to match pictures of pollinators to pictures of flowers. We’ve had a large paper flower where the kids could play butterfly trying to hit the center with their “proboscis” (party horns) while fluttering their wings (arms). Warning - those butterflies can get a little loud!
One of my students created Venus flytrap hand puppets from paper plates and we had a “fly on a string” bouncing from above that the kids could try to catch. That was another idea we found online and it worked great in combination with having an actual Venus flytrap feeding station with real plants and bits of mealworms (bird food) to feed them with.
To help calm them back down after running wild, I’ve found simply having a quiet corner somewhere with nature-themed coloring pages and sets of crayons will work wonders and engage the ones that are a bit shy about participating in any group activities.
I strongly suggest you check out the Beetles Activities
Teaching kids in and about the outdoors is a special skill set.
I admire people like you who want to get kids outdoors. You’re a great man!
so true.
that said, a few ideas:
- start the day by getting the kids to mimic the movements of some different animals. you can mix this up with a “Simon says” game at the end of this. (you could also rehash this throughout the day by doing, say, birds in the morning, reptiles at midday, etc. or alternatively, you could do movements in the morning and sounds at midday, etc.)
- then get them into the mindset of a naturalist by doing some guided sensory exploration of the garden, focusing on plants, making sure they use their senses (except maybe taste) to describe things. for the older kids, make sure they especially focus on the ability to communicate to others what they are observing. you can ask the kids what their favorite and least favorite looking, smelling, feeling, and sounding things were, or you could create a tier list and have them rank different things from the garden. the older kids could do some leaf rubbings or nature sketches and then use those as a basis for a reverse pictionary kind of game where they try to draw what another person describes, or you could do a telephone pictionary kind of game, too.
- then, i would do a little story time as a way to relax a bit. you could prepare some books in a box, and read 5-7 short books for the kids that are related to nature, etc. for the older kids, you coud have some more detailed guide books (ex. butterflies of California) or other general books that they could look through if they didn’t want to listen to the stories being read.
- then i would do a bug hunt in the garden. i think i would divide the group in half. group A would use manifying boxes / bug jars to collect bugs and take a good look at them. you could maybe also teach different bug collecting techniques, too (ex. shaking insects from a bush onto a white cloth below or catching with nets, etc.). group B could maybe do some beelining, or if that’s too much to expensive / complicated, you could maybe take some water samples from your pond and look at them under the microscope. or you could split them into 3 groups, and group C could use Seek to take images of the bugs and other stuff. give each group 30 to 45 minutes for their activity, and then rotate.
- if you wanted, you could end the day with a small craft so that they could take something home for themselves or their family. these could be leaf rubbings, origami, etc., just depending on their skills and development. or maybe you could give them some time to develop their own short Tiktok-style dance that matches their favorite organism that they encountered that day.
How big is the tiny pond? Would it stand some pond-dipping? A few flour sieves, white trays and magnifying glasses will show them a new world of aquatic invertebrates.