My kids love the outdoors, and, like most other kids who love the outdoors, they also like to take a bit of the outdoors with them when it’s time to go back inside. When my oldest first got into the ‘bring things home from outside’ phase, it resulted in a year of my car being pretty dirty. You can only have so many sticks, rocks, and crunched leaves in a car, before it starts to look like animals might be nesting in it. Okay, so it never got that bad. But still, I wasn’t keen on the number of loose rocks in the car, and the sticks and leaves were making a mess.
However, I also want to foster a love of, and interest in the outdoors. I didn’t want to keep my children from bringing anything back from our adventures. Enter: the treasure bowl.
I got this idea when reading Last Child in the Woods. Basically, you keep a bowl in your house to put your nature finds in. Every once in a while, you will want to sort through and makes sure everything in there is worth being in there (we, for example, had had a crap ton of asphalt rocks take up the majority of the bowl when we first started. Now, I think we have 30 pinecones in residence). In an ideal world, I would have my kids only choose one treasure to keep from each proper—not just walking out the front door—outing. However, if you have the space in the bowl, allowing them to find and collect anything that captures their sense of wonder can be lots of fun for them—seed pods, acorns, neat leaves—and it’s exciting for them to see a display stuffed with their own treasures.
As they get older, and as you regularly purge the bowl of things (like crushed up leaves and asphalt rocks, or at least 15 pinecones), they can even have some fun creating a beautiful design out of their favourite finds.
We get the rocks and leaves out of the car, and we have a fun little memory bowl filled with little unique pieces of our adventures together!
What do you do with your kids nature treasures?
