Nature Treasure Hunts with Kids

There are lots of ways to make hiking more enticing to kids. I have one friend who ran ahead and hid little toys along the trail for her young daughter to find as she walked. There's always the alphabet game or rainbow game: find something that starts with every letter, or in every color, in order, as you walk along the trail. 

We have a really great program in our area (central Vermont and New Hampshire) called Valley Quests that has largely done this job for us. Valley Quests are simply walks or hikes in the area made into treasure hunts. There is a quest box at the end-- the top of the mountain or whatever the destination is-- containing a log book to sign your name and write a message if you desire, a tidbit of information about the site, and a handmade stamp with an ink pad so you can make a stamp and remember you were there.  (You could stamp on anything; we own one of the Quest books so we've taken to collecting all our stamps in the back of that.) Along the way there are clues to mark your journey: a huge burl on the side of a tree, an old stone wall, a distant view of a particular mountain from a certain spot.

I have absolutely loved them. There isn't any actual treasure to collect, besides the stamp and the satisfaction of finding the box, which is sometimes pretty tricky! But just having the clues to read and the thrill of being the first to spot this or that landmark is motivating and fun. 

Countless times when I have had time to "kill" with one kid while waiting to pick the other up from an activity, I've gone to the Valley Quest site, where you can search by town, and checked out what quests might be in the vicinity. I am continually impressed that we find special little spots we never knew about this way, even though my husband and I have lived in this area for twenty years.

Where's M?

I feel it is important to note that in general I do not love scavenger-hunt-type things; give a group of kids (or their chaperones!) a scavenger hunt to do on a museum field trip, for example, and you can guarantee they will race through the museum frantically checking things off while being blind to anything and everything not on The List. Scavenger hunts can falsely prescribe what's important and turn off any natural learning or interest. Stepping off my soap box now... Somehow Valley Quests feel different; they introduce us to new natural places, and they make us actually slow down on a walk and really look at all the details around us. Since these quests take place in nature, quite often things have changed a bit since the quest author wrote the clue and now the young sapling is a full-grown tree or the rotting log is fully covered in moss. A "birch with bark so white" took us a long time because it had lost all its bark since the clue had been written. But it's neat to look and look and look and only adds to the excitement when we figure those things out too. 

Finally found it!

Collecting the stamp

Found it!

They aren't all big hikes either-- lots of them are quite short indeed. We've even done a Civil-War-themed cemetery quest, as well as a quest to the tiniest park that we never would have noticed otherwise in downtown Lebanon, NH.

Civil-War-themed cemetery quest

Quest to a tiny downtown park

Our love of Quests inspired my kids and I to make one of our own this year. It was a process, but pretty straight-forward, because the Valley Quest site lays out the steps and materials needed very clearly. We had several fun outings, choosing to do our research on especially nice days, as we tried to settle on a location for our Quest. There was some debate about where it should be-- we didn't want it to be too intense or long of a hike so as not to scare some people away from doing it. We wanted it to be relatively convenient for us to check in on from time to time. We wanted it to be a special spot, with a defined destination, not just a random walk. We wanted it to be in the woods, not in a busy or residential area where it would get accidentally spotted or messed with. Eventually we came to agreement. 

And then we walked it some more. We all brought along clipboards or notebooks and jotted down ideas for fun landmarks and clues. Back at home, we synthesized them into an order. In a few separate sittings, we word-smithed a bit, deciding not to stress ourselves out with rhyming (many Quests we'd done, but not all, seemed to rhyme). We also decided to draw a rough, not-to-scale map to go with it-- my son took this on. We decided to make it a riddle Quest, with blanks to fill in as you go and then some letters to unscramble at the end because my daughter had really enjoyed a Quest of that type we'd done before. Finally, we did a little basic research about the Appalachian Trail and wrote up a paragraph about it to include in our box, because our Quest happens to be located along it. 

Hard at work

Finally, we were down to a really fun art project: carving a rubber stamp. Each Quest has its own unique stamp. We had some different ideas about what our stamp should be. In the end, we had such fun carving the stamps and liked them all so much that we decided to put all three in our finished box and let Questers themselves decide which they wanted to use.       

We submitted our Quest to Vital Communities, the organization that manages them, and they accepted it and posted it to their site. Find it here! 

In our finished plastic Quest box we placed: a small notebook to be a log book, a pencil, a manual pencil sharpener, our stamps, an ink pad, and our card of information about the area. 

It was fun to work on a joint project together, and doing so was a reminder that, with my kids almost five years apart and with different temperaments, it can be pretty challenging to work on a joint project together and meet everybody's needs and wishes! But we did it. Like any big, long-term project, there's a sense of satisfaction when all the pieces come together in the end. (And when we visited our box in the woods recently, after first placing it there about a month ago, it was a reward to find that three people had already visited and signed the log book.) 

We're pretty proud of our Quest and if you ever find yourself in the "Upper Valley" (the Connecticut River Valley area of central Vermont and New Hampshire) with a little extra time on your hands, you might want to check it out. Find our own full Quest here!  

Do you have any programs like Valley Quest in your area, or do you do anything like this to make walks more enticing for your kids?  

Fun for Kids Outside (at Home) in the Middle of Winter

Boy in Woods with Stick

"Exploring" in the woods with a stick in hand is how this boy is happiest. The above photo is a rare moment of calm, though; usually he's using his latest, greatest stick as a club to whack things, or pretending it's a spear/sword/bow. 

Both my kids always end up finding activities to be engrossed in outdoors in all seasons, even on the rare days when they at first say they didn't feel like going out. 

We try to go outside every day even during this season of cold and dark. It's easy to find things to do when there is fresh snow: we head out with the purpose of shoveling steps and porches, or sledding, or building a snow creation. But most of the time we bundle and head out just for the sake of the routine of getting out, even when no specific purpose particularly calls us. While I love our family outings to go cross-country skiing or ice skating, just hanging out in the yard on an average weekday afternoon when it's twenty degrees outside is not always something I personally feel like. But it's always worth just doing. This is a lesson I have had to learn over and over. They find things to do. Outdoors has the power to restore every day, not just on the fair-weather days. Cheeks turn pink, moods lift, conversations are had that wouldn't have been had face-to-face at the kitchen table, treasures are discovered, games invented. Afterward we all feel more ready for whatever is next, more tired-in-a-good-way at the end of the day, more connected with the world around us. 

Here are some of the things my kids have been loving to do outside right now.

Fun for Kids Outside (at Home) in the Middle of Winter:

• Go sledding. My kids don't even require a sled lately.    

• Snurf. W's snurfer has provided a lot of entertainment. 

• Build a snow person or fort or other creation. Compare said creations or build together. 
• Shovel the steps or porch.   

• Shovel a path around the perimeter of your yard. We started doing this years ago for our dog, who doesn't like to walk through deep snow. Now he's older and doesn't venture too far regardless, but we've kept up the habit. We all use it, and creating it after a big snow is a satisfying project. 

• Look for animal tracks and try to follow where they go. Sometimes we take photos of them with Google Lens and try to identify them. They love to imagine the busy nightlife of the animals right in our backyard. Tiny little mouse prints are just as cool to see as deer. 
• Venture into the woods. W especially loves to go beyond our fenced yard and "explore" in the woods. He loves to check out remnants of an old foundation, find perfect sticks for doing this or that, or play hide and seek in one area for a while. They discover things just by being there. A few weeks ago they discovered little spots like air bubbles on the bark of an evergreen tree behind our garage. When they poked at the spots with a stick, clear, gooey pitch/sap came out, sometimes as much as half a teaspoon. They tried to "collect" it and used it to glue leaves to stumps and things. Hopefully they weren't harming the tree, but they both were so joyful discovering this neat little phenomenon. 

Harvesting pitch

• Dig a tunnel through a snowbank and try to crawl through. 
• Bring hot chocolate in a thermos and drink it outdoors. 
• Throw snowballs at a target-- the swing set, a certain tree, the fence post. 
• Snow volcano-- usually I don't plan at all for outside time, but one day I brought the supplies out for this snow volcano I'd seen online, and they got a kick out of it. After a while M had fun just spreading around the colorful foam we'd created.

• Spray colored water on snow. M enjoys putting water and food coloring in a spray bottle and misting the snow banks or snow sculptures. 
• Take photos of cool things, like these upside-down icicles we found.

• Go for a walk. While the kids never bore of the yard, some days I make them go for a walk. They search ever-optimistically for dropped antlers, climb the snow banks, and generally continue to act like kids outdoors even when we are covering some distance. 

Read Aloud and the Case for Picture Books

A lot of homeschoolers talk about family read aloud: gathering all the kids together-- from toddlers to teenagers-- and sharing great literature. This sounds lovely and I'd become curious about those perfect texts that would engage multiple ages at once.

We have always read to our kids a lot, and at bedtime, religiously. But we've mostly read to them separately, not together. I've got a kindergartner and a fifth grader, so they're at pretty different stages. (My 10-year-old reads to himself plenty all the time, but we still read aloud to him at bedtime-- I'll take it for as long as I can!) There are so many amazing books out there for big kids and it's always fun to choose what he and I will read together next. Currently my husband is reading a book from the 39 Clues series to W, while W and I have just begun The Phantom Tollbooth. While he listens, W likes to draw or color or, most often lately, work on pictures in one of his several Extreme Dot-to-Dot books. When I read to my five-year old daughter, on the other hand, we read High Five or Ladybug magazine or one of the seven hundred picture books we own. M is completely absorbed by the pictures and she sits in my lap or curls up next to me, scrutinizing every page and interjecting with questions.

But having both my kids home for the final months of this past school year helped me realize how valuable it is to find shared learning experiences for them-- things they can both access even with their age difference, even if they get different things out of them. I thought I'd try to make reading together a bit of a routine this summer and make an effort to find great read alouds we could all share. I tried reading a few classic novels aimed at a young audience to both my kids together. Here are a few thoughts on each of the ones we tried.

~ ~ ~

The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams: Written in the 1920s, it's a magical story with a nice message. I think it's nice to read kids some books like this one that are written long ago. It helps give them get a taste for what childhood might have been like before their grandparents were born, and helps them take in language they aren't familiar with. Even with words like "brigands," this one is a story about a stuffed animal after all.

Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne: Some sweet humor that you have to be a bigger kid to understand and we found ourselves explaining to M some of the jokes that entire chapters were based on (like the spotted and herbaceous "Backson" that lives in the animals' imaginations after Christopher Robin leaves a note intending to say that he'll be "back soon"). But it is still an extra-lovable story. Some of the situations those friends get themselves into are so funny. The games they play, feelings they have, and "expotitions" they go on are beautifully child-like and relatable.

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Betty MacDonald: This was probably the biggest mutual hit with my kids. It was concrete (and formulaic) enough for my youngest but clever and funny enough for my oldest.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll: I have to admit we haven't yet finished this strange book. I'd never read it myself, though at many parts I can clearly visualize the Disney movie that I did see as a kid. Some of the strangeness is a hoot (following a rabbit down a hole one day out of boredom), and some is just strange and a little harder to follow.

A Bear Called Paddington, Michael Bond: My son loved Paddington (though he's also seen the very-good movie and it was a rare case where he liked the movie more) but my daughter got bored by the end. Sweet story about a London family taking in a bear who is always sticky with marmalade and gets into various innocent scrapes.

Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren: The sheer ridiculousness of it is fascinating. Here's a kid who lives on her own, plays with guns, doesn't go to school at all (not even remote or hybrid or homeschool!), who wins over burglars just by being herself, and is never afraid. But Pippi is so bold and fun. Maybe in some ways she embodies the inner wishes of kids-- rolling out cookie dough on the floor and living with a monkey and a pony and not having a bedtime. I'm glad we read it. While reading it, W was often making connections to some other favorite female protagonists I'm glad to say he's known and loved-- Anne (of Green Gables), Ramona, and Junie B.

Homer Price, Robert McCloskey: Like all Robert McCloskey books, it feels so very old-fashioned. W liked it. Each chapter is its own little story, entertaining and less than believable, with situations involving burglars and a pet skunk, a kid left in charge of a restaurant on his own, and prize-winning balls of yarn. There's a picture on every other page. M seems to like it and mostly follow along, but doesn't love it.

~ ~ ~

The only "chapter" books I'd read to M before this summer were things like Frog and Toad, Henry and Mudge, and Mr. Putter and Tabby-- all of which she loves-- but each chapter is its own little story with the same characters and themes over and over, and the whole book can be read in one sitting.

W is always hooked by the novelty of any new story, and likes a good book, no matter what reading level it is. While he consumes big thick books like Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, he will also laugh out loud over The Berenstain Bears if one is left lying around. I knew he would enjoy almost anything.

Aside from Winnie-the-Pooh, the longer books we read together this summer were new for all of us. W and I loved them all-- turns out there's a reason they are classics. M liked...some of them. There were certain bizarre details she tuned into in Pippi Longstocking (she demonstrates to us at bedtime many evenings now how Pippi sleeps with her feet on the pillow and her head under the covers). And I think she was engaged for a lot of Winnie-the-Pooh and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. But I found I needed to stop often to try to keep M on the same page in the longer, picture-less books (some we listened to as audio books so they may have had pictures but we didn't see them). Sometimes she asked questions, or I would tell her what words meant, or have W share a simple inference when she didn't get what was happening, or we'd explain to her what was so funny when we laughed. I was reminded that, at five, M needs a story that's fairly concrete, especially when she has to visualize it all herself. When she looked bored or wasn't able to answer a basic story question if I asked her one, I thought, what exactly am I gaining here by sharing this "classic" with her at this stage? There were certainly things she got out of some of them. But there were enough things she missed that she didn't fully absorb the magic of these great stories. I remain convinced that it is a small, special niche of novels that really, truly work for the under-six set. (Other five-year-olds may have loved these stories or even more sophisticated ones; every kid is different.) A few months or a year from now M will be at a different stage and the types of books she loves will grow and change. But there's no rush.

Summer outdoor bedtime read aloud with W

All this has renewed my love and belief in quality picture books for all ages.

As a first-grade teacher I would sometimes have parent-teacher conferences in which a parent would worry about the skills of their blossoming child, saying they thought he was using the pictures in books to guess what the words said. Some of these parents would even say they covered up the picture to make their child focus on the words! But there is a reason pictures are in books for young kids: pictures support the text and help with comprehension and word solving (it's a great sign if a beginning reader is using every bit of information on the page and multiple strategies to figure out an unfamiliar word, including looking at the pictures). Pictures also help engage them and get them hooked on books in general, pictures supply detail and richness to the experience and the conversations you can have, and sometimes pictures even (often comically, intentionally) say more, or say something different than, the text. (Think of Mercer Mayer's Little Critter books and how funny they are specifically because of this contradiction between text and illustration.) Pictures in picture books are a big part of the art form, and of the experience of coming to know and love books for young kids. When I was in the classroom I only chose to read one or two novels to my students in a year because there were just so many good picture books I wanted to share and so little time.

I also believe in continuing to read picture books to upper-elementary age kids. Firstly, plenty of older kids still need the support of pictures for reading itself or to aid comprehension. Also, picture books are a nice little package that you can read in one sitting; you can quickly accumulate many stories-- each with its own plot, setting, themes, character traits, conflict, resolution, writer's style-- that are not only pleasant shared experiences, but provide lots of opportunities to discuss, analyze, and compare. (I love the simple concept of reading a Book a Day for older-- even high-school-age-- students for these very reasons.) Beyond those benefits that any good picture book has for bigger kids, some picture books are specifically aimed at kids in 4th, 5th, 6th grade and beyond-- I am thinking of the clever word play of Miss Alaineus, the dark historical fiction Rose Blanche, Dr. Seuss's social commentary in books like The King's Stilts, or the opportunities for interpretation in rich stories like Roxaboxen.

For now, if I want to sit with my two kids and read aloud, picture books are still best for us. I pause a few times while reading-- but not too much-- for discussion. I might direct a higher-level question toward W and a more basic one toward M (though I wouldn't point that fact out to them). (This might include predicting what will happen next at a key point, inferring (why do you think she stomped out the room?), describing what a character is like, noticing details in the illustrations, or talking about what the characters learned.) And I remind myself that hearing stories isn't the only thing they can do and learn from together. Just as worthwhile are things like art projects, the blanket forts they build, the desserts they concoct together to surprise us, and the songs they teach each other on their respective instruments.

~ ~ ~

Multi-Age Picture Books to Read Aloud
Here are just a few favorite picture books that are rich and interesting enough for olders, but still digestible and engaging for youngers. There are so many to choose from!

• Beatrice's Goat, Page McBrier
• Toot and Puddle, Holly Hobbie
• Fireflies, Julie Brinckloe
• Too Tall Houses, Gianna Marino
• books by Bill Peet
• Leo the Late Bloomer, Robert Kraus
• Tops and Bottoms, Janet Stevens
• Mirette on the High Wire, Emily Arnold McCully 
• Strega Nona, Tomie dePaola
• Christmas Trolls, Jan Brett
• Violet the Pilot, Steve Breen
• The Empty Pot, Demi
• Owl Moon, Jane Yolen
• Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, Mem Fox
• The White-Footed Mouse, Willem Lange
• Circus Ship and other books by Chris Van Dusen
• Ish, Peter H. Reynolds 
• and many more!

What are your recommendations for the best read alouds for multiple ages together, or for any age?

Fun Summer Science Projects with Kids

For a long time now, grandparents have gifted our kids subscriptions to project kits from KiwiCo. These shoebox-size packages come in the mail each month and they are great. They are hands-on, science-related kits that come with everything you need to build or make something. We've had kits where the kids made a model solar system, a manual carpet sweeper, a projector, a camera obscura, a pendulum, a coin-eating robot, a spirograph, labyrinths, and more. There are different "Crates" available aimed toward different age ranges. M received the playful, arts and crafts Koala Crates (ages 2 - 4) for a while, but we recently switched her subscription to the slightly more involved and more science-oriented Kiwi Crates (ages 5 - 8); W used to get Kiwi Crates, but for a while tried out Atlas Crates (geography and culture, aimed at ages 6 - 11) and more recently has gotten Tinker Crates (science and engineering for ages 9 - 16+). All the kits come with a booklet of instructions as well as a booklet of extra information and ideas on that month's theme. My daughter, especially, absolutely loves her Crates and wants to dig into them as soon as they arrive. My husband or I sit nearby the kids while they work on a kit, to help interpret directions or give tips, but try to keep our hands out of it and really let it be their creation. The projects are always age-appropriate; they always include challenges but are very doable.

Some of the benefits of the KiwiCo kits are:

• practice following written/visual directions to create something 3-D
• fine motor practice
• extra science learning
• opportunities to see a big project through to completion by doing various smaller steps
• practicing new skills that can take a little tinkering and persistence-- like weaving, or connecting wires...

Literally the one con to these kits is:

• what to do with the stuff they create each month??

These homemade toys get played with for a while and are a nice subject for show and tell with grandparents, but a lot of fun is in the creating and learning. Afterward they can fill up their bedrooms and cover every available surface and become one of our main sources of clutter. It'd be better if I was one of those moms who could just throw it away after a couple of weeks. (I'm always looking for a better storage/display/disposal system for these creations and would seriously love ideas if anyone has any!)

One more neat thing is that each kit comes with a published book on a related topic. Sometimes the books are picture books-- fiction, nonfiction, and even poetry. But several times the accompanying book has been a fat resource book full of more ideas for cool science projects! We've had a stack of such books sitting around and we weren't getting around to trying many of them out during the school year. It felt like an embarrassment of riches. So this summer I gathered and bought some of the supplies that some of these projects called for and we've been enjoying trying them out. Some of them have been more exciting than others. Our favorite book with the most exciting (and involved) projects is Recycled Science.

The highlight of this random science inspiration we've enjoyed from these books lately has been popsicle stick chain reactions-- creating a woven chain of jumbo popsicle sticks. It takes patience and motor coordination to make it hold together in the beginning (each stick is bent a little to tuck under and over the others to hold together). When you unhook the beginning of the chain, all the stored energy is released and they seem to explode in sequence. My 10-year-old created these again and again, making longer and longer ones, and always wanting them filmed in slow-motion. (We got the inspiration from Recycled Science, but found clarity on the finer details of how to do it with this YouTube video.) Highly recommended!

Another project we tried from the same book was this simple siphon idea. Start sucking through one end of the tube (and stop in time!) then watch the water flow from one container to the other because of atmospheric pressure. Now my kids know what to do if their car ever runs out of gas.

We also made great bubble solution and a big bubble wand (from the book Maker Lab: Outdoors) to make some giant bubbles. It was addicting to keep trying to make the biggest, longest-lasting one (or, in M's case, to jump and try to pop them).

We've also made a barometer, a butterfly feeder, a contraption to grow bean seeds hydroponically, and a really cool vinegar-and-baking-soda bottle rocket-- none of which we photographed...

Some of these random summer projects were more sensational or memorable than others. But either way the project-making itself has been fun.