I have always loved the changing of the seasons. Mother nature is amazing and it is incredible to see how the leaves change colour in the autumn; the icy frost and dry crisp air in the winter; the new flower and tree shoots in the spring and then of course the incredible greenery in the summer (amongst other things of course). I really think it is important to share all of this with my children and in the autumn I created a scavenger hunt in the garden. Now that it is spring (although with heat wave it almost seems like summer already) I wanted to do something similar and seeing as though there is a lot more colour appearing in the garden I thought it would be fun to do a colour scavenger hunt.
This is a wonderful activity because it gets the children out into the garden and into that lovely spring sunshine (don’t forget the sunscreen) and searching for all sorts of fun spring colours. This means that they are stimulating their visual senses as well as their sense of smell (sniffing the new spring flowers) and touch. And the best part is that this activity won’t cost you a cent. All you need to do is pop to your nearest hardware store and collect a whole lot of different paint swatches (the paint assistant thought I was nuts and that I must have a very interesting looking house).
Head out into the garden and give your children a couple of swatches at a time, then ask them to try to find things in the garden that match.
Pretty bougainvillea
Get them to identify what the colour is when they find a match and you could even teach them the names of the plants (thankfully I don’t have anything too exotic in my garden, plant names are not my strong point).
My two and a half year old is grasping colours really well now and I loved seeing how she managed to match and identify most of the colours on the paint swatches.
We managed to keep this going for quite some time and when they were finished, my little ones brought their swatches inside and ran around finding matches all over the house.
The dogs were trying to help.
If you don’t have a garden you can still do this activity. Simply take your littles ones and your swatches to the local park or even the nursery to match their swatches.
If you can get your children to part with their colour swatches and the end of the activity make sure you keep them to use for another activity or craft at a later stage.