Nature fun!

 Fall/Nature Fun at HDC!

    Our students have been enjoying the benefits of bringing nature into the classroom. This gives children opportunities to value, wonder and ask questions to investigate natural materials further. 

Here are a few of the nature based learning activities going on at HDC!

 

We are very lucky to have chestnut trees on our school property. The children love to collect the, "conkers" and use them for imaginative play.

Here the children are using chestnuts to make shapes.

The teachers and students then count how many they used to complete the shape. 

Lots of fun hands on math!

 

Here the children were using the chestnuts to cover the game board. The children had to roll the dice and identify the numeral that corresponded with the dots on the dice.

 

Chestnuts can be lots of fun to paint with using paintbrushes or by adding paint on top of them and rolling them around inside a box. This helps to strengthen their hand eye coordination and visual tracking skills.

Chestnuts are also super fun to play with!

Here the children sorted leaves by size. Big, medium and small. This activity also set the stage for great conversations about the characteristics of each leaf and helped the children use descriptive language and vocabulary. They were also able to compare and contrast the various types of leaves and learn which tree they were from. 

The children brought these leaf papers outside and tried to find which tree the leaves came off of. They had to use their visual discrimination skills to determine differences and similarities between the leaves and the tree. 

Leaves are great for a cutting bin too (and totally waste free)! This is a great way for children to start working on cutting skills and fine motor development. 

The younger children have been exploring apples! Marcie had cut ribbons of various lengths for the children to determine which one would fit around the different apples. This was a great hands on activity for our youngest learners to experiment with measurement and circumference.

Here the children were having fun weighing the apples and trying to balance them in the scale.

The children in our Kindergarten class went on a nature scavenger hunt! 

Click here for a copy of the scavenger hunt that they used.

Here are some of the children making a nature collage with some of the materials they found on their nature walk! They are going to use this to make a collaborative mural for their classroom. Great teamwork guys!

Here the children and teachers labeled parts of the pumpkin to explore and hung them in their science center. Since we are not able to have them all touch the pumpkin and explore together the teachers made sure to have them in a spot where everyone can see, discuss and ask questions.

Leaf rubbings are always a fun activity and help the children to look for details. The process of looking for detail strengthens essential visual discrimination skills, the same skills children use to learn the differences between letters.

Stacking pumpkins is great for hand eye coordination and learning through trial and error!

Nature truly is a wonderful teacher! It engages all the senses! We are so blessed to live in New England and enjoy the best of all the seasons, especially Fall! 

Happy learning friends!!!