Mama's Den: Nature Play

By Jennifer Wooldridge

@mamasden

How has your week been? I hope you have managed to have a think about what your top resources are in your homes? Finding fun ways to engage the children at home is really important at the moment and I for one am finding that keeping things simple is really working.

With us all restricted on our movements during lockdown we need to make the most of our daily exercise, enjoy the world around us and focus on fun times with our families. We have just celebrated Earth day 2020 which seems even more poignant this year with the focus worldwide being on the current pandemic.

I touched upon our love of natural play last week in my blog all about my top 5 resources so I thought this week I would elaborate on some ways we use nature, and share ideas for natural crafts. DIY crafting has been extremely popular on my social media channels this week so here is the method behind what we have created.

To evoke a sense of joy we have tried to capture a little bit of our natural world in some homemade crafts which I cannot wait for you to share with me by tagging @mamasden on Instagram if you replicate.

The main thing that you will notice with all of these crafts is that they require very little in the way of resources but rely on you getting out with your family in a mindful hygge moment and collecting natural resources and having fun. If you want to collect flowers without picking them from a flower bed you could always buy a bunch of flowers and place these around your garden for children to ‘hunt’.

Natural Sign

A great way of encouraging phonics, spelling or to discuss a topic is to make a natural sign. We created Earth signs when we celebrated Earth day and talked about the world, the news, our favourite animals and plants and what we are looking forward to doing once out of lockdown. Use some cardboard from your recycling and PVA glue and get hunting. These are great used on a nature walk or just in your own garden.

Pressed flowers

Pressing flowers is such a lovely way of marking the changes you see in the seasons. We bought a flower press afew months ago and have just started pressing flowers with the first signs of spring. Every day at the moment we are spotting new flowers in the gardens and adding them to our flower press. If you do not have a press this can still be achieved by placing flowers between 2 sheets of paper and putting under heavy books.

Sun catchers

This week we collected flowers in our garden and sealed them in laminating pouches. These create natural sun catchers and can by tacked to a window or we took this craft one step further and create natural frames using twigs from the woodland park. We made the sun catcher and then went to the woods to assemble them and enjoyed watching them blow in the wind before bringing them home for a window display. This craft has proven extremely popular this week and I am really enjoying seeing everyone creating them.

As an alternative tracing paper or contact paper could be used as the panel.

These are just afew simple ideas you could try to get you closer to nature. It is really all about appreciating the smaller things and creating a calming atmosphere rather than being all about fast paced busy days.

We all are learning to appreciate the smaller things and I am enjoying nature that little bit more this year, how about you?

Have a wonderful week

Jen x