Our FREE Guide to Winter is jam packed with tips, tricks and inspiration to help your whole family get the most out of winter—and do it your way. Find our Winter 2022 Gear Guide with favorite gear from across our Tinkergarten community, too!
Our FREE Guide to Winter is jam packed with tips, tricks and inspiration to help your whole family get the most out of winter—and do it your way. Find our Winter 2022 Gear Guide with favorite gear from across our Tinkergarten community, too!
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Fall Feast
Age: 0 to 8
Time: Under 1 hour
Materials: kitchen items that can get dirty, objects from nature, water
One of the most important things we do together as families, especially around the holidays, is make and enjoy feasts. From an early age, the spices and foods we share are encoded in memory and are part of our family identity. In this activity, explorers draw inspiration from the book The Greatest Table by Michael J. Rosen and “shop,” mix, swirl and experiment to “cook” a nature feast for family, friends and neighbors.
Head outside and wonder, "Do you think we could make a pretend feast big enough for all to enjoy? Who could we invite to join us for a feast? What creatures could we invite for our feast?"
Go shopping:
Hand out buckets and help explorers “shop” for nature ingredients. These could be acorns, grass, rocks, fallen leaves, and more!
Cook:
Invite your wee ones to “cook” with the nature treasures they collected. You can give them buckets, pots, pie tins, or anything else you don’t mind getting dirty. Add some water and dirt into the mix along with the nature ingredients they collected. You can even construct an outdoor kitchen.
Spice it up:
Bring out spices that your family uses often when cooking. Talk with your wee ones about what the spices are called, and why they are important to your family. Offer them to kids to sprinkle or add special flair to their dishes. You can also invite them to experiment mixing spices with water.
Set the table and enjoy a feast:
Pull out an old sheet table cloth, mason jars for a centerpiece of fallen treasures—anything to make your feast a celebration. Then pretend to smell, taste and savor your delectable delights.
When families talk together about something as near and dear to them as the foods they love to eat or make, kids get to learn more and connect with their cultural roots. If you are able, invite friends to play, and help your child see and celebrate the value and diversity of traditions we have in our culture. Mixing, stirring, sloshing and mashing nature treasures, making mud, or arranging objects to make a holiday feast is all satisfying work that is tremendous sensory development for kids of all ages.
Food and cooking are play contexts that are both common and yet open-ended, which means that children of different ages can play together and still challenge themselves and one another in appropriate ways. Imagining different uses for objects and pretending to create a feast is also a super way to develop kids' creative thinking!
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Sample the additional activities and resources families get each week to keep kids learning outside at home.
Imagination is defined in many ways, but one we like is, "the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality." This is no small task to little kids, and yet young childhood is a time in which imagination is developed more than any other. How does imagination develop in childhood? Through an increasingly sophisticated life of make believe.
We all likely have a sense of what we mean by make believe or good old "pretend play." How do experts define it, though? To some, there are different types of make believe that vary in sophistication and make pretend play different than other types of play. For example, kids may use objects to represent something else (e.g. a block becomes a cell phone). Or, they may start to give an object certain properties (e.g. a doll is asleep or a tree is on fire!). Still yet, they may themselves take on the properties of someone or something else.
From there, pretend play evolves into acting out scenarios or stories, those getting increasingly intricate as imagination develops. As kids' pretend play grows more sophisticated, these stories come to involve not only the creative use of objects, but multiple perspectives (e.g. good and bad guys in the same story), and/or the playful manipulation of ideas and emotions (e.g. I am sad, but then become happy after I save the village from certain doom).
Why does it matter?
An ever growing body of research substantiates the many benefits of pretend play including the enhanced development of: language and communication skills; self-control and empathy; flexible and abstract thinking; and creativity. These are the skills that will help kids balance emotions, form healthy relationships, work effectively on teams, stay focused in school, be successful at various jobs and solve the problems of an increasingly complicated world. An individual's creativity in particular, both requires and is limited by her imagination.
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?
Teamwork
Category:
Social Skills
What is Teamwork?
Teamwork is the ability to be both an individual contributor and a supportive member of a group. Not easy for little ones, but never too early to start learning how. Although the notion of teamwork seems rather self explanatory, the combination of skills that are required for kids to effectively work on a team is rather complex. People can work effectively in a group when they have a sense of their own strengths and needs, the ability to understand the needs and motivations of others, the ability to agree and focus on a common goal, and the capacity to adjust their personal needs for the good of the group. Needless to say, young kids are too young to master these skills, but they can make tremendous progress if we give them genuine experience with teamwork and help them develop the foundations that underlie this more complex set of skills.
On a most basic level, kids start to build teamwork skills as they learn to negotiate and share limited resources. Anyone who has kids know that these skills do not come naturally, but are developed with age and practice. Kids who have experience sharing and working in groups without the dominant management of parent or authority figure (e.g. the good old pick-up game of kick-the-can that was managed only by the kids in the neighborhood) get much more opportunity to develop the self awareness and skills needed for effective collaboration. The more chances we give kids to feel the pleasure in sharing and giving, the more quickly they become effective at sharing. In addition, when we model how to set a goal and allow kids to practice working towards that goal, we model the behavior they will eventually adopt as their won. Finally, when they experience success as a member of a team, they develop a lasting sense of the power of teamwork and the motivation to start to value a team over themselves.
Why does it matter?
Collaboration makes the cut on nearly every list of top 21st-century skills—and it has become not just a goal but a requirement for most jobs. Technology increasingly enables people to work together with people who differ by geography, culture and mindset, and businesses and institutions worldwide expect employees to work effectively in both face-to-face and in virtual teams. Those who collaborate effectively will not only be effective workers but will be poised to help find solutions to the increasingly complicated challenges this young generation will face.
Further, in most schools from elementary level up, kids get more out of the curriculum if they know how to work well in groups, and this trend of increased peer-to peer-teaching and learning is only gaining ground in older school years. Research even shows that how well young children solve simple problems in groups predicts how they will transition to and fare in formal schooling.
Age: 0 to 8
Time: Under 1 hour
Materials: kitchen items that can get dirty, objects from nature, water
