What is camping (or life, really) without food to give us energy and enjoy time together? This week at Tinkergarten Anywhere, as part of our pretend camping unit, we'll set up pretend campfires and mud kitchens in which we whip up nature treats to "enjoy" at our pretend cookout.
The Guide
Step 1: Gather materials:
Soil and water
Kitchen tools (e.g. bowls, muffin tins, pie pans, cooking pot)
Step 2: Watch the Tinkergarten Anywhere Campsite Cookout video lesson.
Hop into your My Tinkergarten trial dashboard to watch the Campsite Cookout video lesson. Kids can watch how Meghan and other explorers build pretend campfires and mud kitchens, then get inspired to whip up their own campfire treats!
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Step 3: Invite play and choose a spot to set up camp.
After you watch the video, ask kids, “How can you cook up a feast for a pretend campsite cookout?” Offer the kitchen tools you gathered and invite kids to head outside and look for a good spot to set up their campsite (e.g. an area with an open patch of dirt, access to water, a tree for shade, access to nature treasures).
Step 4: Build a pretend campfire.
Invite kids to gather and arrange sticks and items found in nature to build a pretend campfire to cook food, warm everyone at night or bring everyone together for singing. Need inspiration? Try out one of these types of campfire structures. We've had the most success making the Log Cabin, Teepee and Star types with kids.
Once their fire is built, marvel at what they have created. Take a small stick or other object and pretend to light the fire. How does the fire "feel"? Do we need to add more wood to the fire to keep it going?
As an added bonus, kids can add red fabric or scraps of paper to make pretend flames. You can also offer forest putty that kids can “roast” on sticks over the pretend campfire.
Step 5: Make campfire treats!
Ask kids what kind of campfire food they would like to make at their campsite. Where could they find ingredients for their pretend cookout? If kids packed a treasure box of nature treasure ingredients, make it available for their cookout. Or, invite kids to use a bag, bucket or bindle to “shop” for sticks, leaves, seeds, tree fruits, flowers, grasses, etc. in their outdoor space.
Make water available and welcome kids to make mud for their campfire cookout. If you’d like, explore some different mud recipes in your cooking play.
(Optional) Offer some herbs or spices and welcome kids to add them to their campsite food.
Step 5: Support play with “juicy questions”.
Food gets all of us engaged and talking, which makes cooking play an ideal time to engage kids in conversation and support communication skills. When we offer kids the chance to answer open-ended questions about their own experiences, we offer them wonderful practice with expressing. As kids play, look for signs that kids are ready to chat. When they are ready, try out some of these "juicy questions" to get them thinking and talking.
Want more ideas? Try out some of these campfire-themed DIY activities:
Food gets all of us engaged and talking, which makes cooking play an ideal time to engage kids in conversation and practice communication skills. This activity will engage all senses, helping kids to take in and process information about the world and helping their brains engage in a more robust and profound way. Pretending to gather, warm up and cook over a pretend fire supports creativity and imaginative play. Finally, constructing pretend fires and setting up a mud kitchen is marvelous practice in problem-solving.
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By communication, we mean the ability to listen, understand, speak, read and write and more. In order to communicate effectively, kids must learn to understand what they want to get across, then decide on how to convey their messages, working to coordinate the mind and body to do so. They also need to learn to anticipate how the message will be received by another person(s). This is rather elegant and requires a symphony of physical, cognitive and social capabilities. The more children can practice, the better!
Why does it matter?
On a very practical level, kids need to be able to express questions and ideas in order to learn. Kids who communicate effectively can test ideas, seek help and let their formal and informal teachers in the world know what they understand and where they need support. Kids will also need strong and nuanced communication skills in order to work well in peer groups and manage relationships with authority figures, critical parts of life in classrooms and beyond. Later in life, they will need these skills to form close relationships, advocate for themselves within communities and be effective in the workplace.
Creativity
Category:
Thinking Skills
What is Creativity?
By creativity, we mean the ability to both imagine original ideas or solutions to problems and actually do what needs to be done to make them happen. So, to help kids develop creativity, we parents need to nurture kids' imaginations and give them lots of chances to design, test, redesign and implement their ideas.
"Creativity is as important now in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
Why, you ask? For one, it is through being creative that a person is able to get senses, sensibility and spirit working together. Simply put, without creativity, we don't think our kids will live a full life.
On a more practical level, it's also the means by which humans of all ages make an impact on the world and other people around them. A lot of heavy stuff is going to go down in our kids' lifetime, and their generation will need to imagine and implement solutions to big and very complicated problems. Although our kids are still far from public office or the boardroom, today's political and business leaders worldwide are already pointing to creativity as the most important leadership quality for the future.
Although years from the art studio or design lab, little kids can learn to think and act creatively if you give them time and the right practice.
Sensory
Category:
Body Skills
What is Sensory Development?
Although some scientists classify as many as 20 senses, when childhood educators talk about "developing the senses," we typically mean developing the five standard senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. In addition to honing these senses, educators care about sensory integration, which is the ability to take in, sort out, process and make use of information gathered from the world around us via the senses.
Why does it matter?
The better kids are able to tune and integrate their senses, the more they can learn. First, if their senses are sharper, the information kids can gather should be of greater quantity and quality, making their understanding of the world more sophisticated. Further, until the lower levels of the brain can efficiently and accurately sort out information gathered through the senses, the higher levels cannot begin to develop thinking and organization skills kids need to succeed. Senses also have a powerful connection to memory. Children (and adults) often retain new learning when the senses are an active part of the learning.
So, if kids have more sensory experiences, they will learn more, retain better and be better able to think at a higher level. Makes the days they get all wet and dirty in the sandbox seem better, doesn't it?
Age: 0 to 8+
Time: 1 hour+
Materials: Soil and water; kitchen tools (e.g. bowls, muffin tins); nature treasures and sticks; (Optional) Forest Putty
